BJ 1581 



HALFORD E.LUCCOCK 










Class 
Book. 



Copyright)) . 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



FARES, PLEASE! 

AND OTHER ESSAYS ON 
PRACTICAL THEMES 



BY 

HALFORD E. LUCCOCK 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






Copyright, 1916, by 
HALFORD E. LUCCOCK 




7 

MAR 25 1916 
©CI.A427403 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Foreword 5 

I. Fares, Please ! 7 

II. Masters of Arts 12 

III. Are You a Person of Distinction? 19 

IV. Doorkeepers 23 

V. Is God on Your Visiting List ? . . . 28 

VI. Thinking in a Circle 32 

VII. The Giant Thriller 37 

VIII. On the Line of Discovery 43 

IX. Getting into Society 48 

X. The Sunny Side of Ten 54 

XL A Binet Test for Defectives 59 

XII. What's the News ? 65 

XIII. Three Chairs 70 

XIV. How Much Are You Worth ? 75 

XV. The Surprise of Life 80 

XVI. Safety First ? 85 

XVII. What Do You Expect Your Church 

to Do for You? 90 

3 



4 CONTENTS 

CHAPTEB PAGE 

XVIII. What Does Your Church Ex- 
pect of You? 95 

XIX. The Highest Heredity 99 

XX. Carried Over from Childhood 

— Liabilities 104 

XXI. "The Will" 110 

XXII. "Dutch Courage" 115 

XXIII. High-Handed Tyranny 120 

XXIV. A Hair-Trigger Constitution. 126 
XXV. The Latest Thing 131 

XXVI. Over the Wall 137 

XXVII. Clouding the Issue 143 

XXVIII. The Fallacy of Preparation.. 149 

XXIX. The Creative Influences of 

the Church 154 

XXX. Which Kingdom ? 160 

XXXI. "A Maxim Silencer for Old 

Wheezes " 165 

XXXII. Pilgrim's Progress — Revised . . 170 

XXXIII. Washing the Am 175 

XXXIV. "At Your Peril ! " 180 

XXXV. Everything Upside Down 184 

XXXVI. Getting All Run Down 188 

XXXVII. " Splendid Failures " 193 

XXXVIII. Swan Songs 199 



FOREWORD 

It is a happy book whose chapters live and 
work together as a family of blood relatives. 

This little volume cannot aspire to such 
felicity. Its covers open on an orphan asylum 
rather than a family. Like the inmates of an 
Orphans' Home, its chapters are many and 
are all small; they are dressed in but the 
plainest workaday gingham and calico; they 
are all waifs — picked up on widely scattered 
lanes of observation. 

Yet for a' that, they are not entirely unre- 
lated. They are on speaking terms with one 
another, and try, at least, to speak a common 
language of faith and hope. They all believe 
that life is an affair of great zest and great 
prizes, and they share together the conviction 
of Arthur Hugh Clough that "Life loves no 
lookers on at his great game." 

The essays are offered simply in the hope 
that they may prove suggestive starting points 
for thought. 

Halford E. Luccock. 

New Haven, Connecticut. 

5 



FARES, PLEASE! 

The smile on the face of the conductor of 
the 7:29 to the city every morning is a real 
event in the daily life of scores of commuters. 
His genial "Good morning" goes to make up 
for the lack of sunshine on cloudy days. Yet 
all the passengers know that behind the 
warmth of the smile and the unfeigned cor- 
diality of the greeting is the stern insistence 
of "Fares, please, gentlemen!" For the 7:29 
every day is not a charity outing; it is a pay- 
as-you-go enterprise. 

The world greets its children with a smile 
and a sunny "Good morning," and some are so 
entranced with the smile and the "bloom o' the 
world" that they fail to notice with any clear- 
ness the iron demand, "Fares, please!" A 
recent astronomer has waxed enthusiastic over 
the glorious free ride nature gives us in the 
swing of the planet, hurtling through billions 
of miles of azure sky and tinted cloud at the 
rate of so many miles a minute. He calls it the 

7 



8 FARES, PLEASE! 

grandest roller coaster in the universe. He is 
right when he calls it glorious. He is wrong 
when he calls it free. 

To some people the art of life largely con- 
sists in evading the fare. Paul's noble thought, 
"I am debtor," is still Greek to them. H. G. 
Wells says truly that people can go through 
life "fudging and evading and side-stepping, 
till their first contact with elemental realities 
is the cold sweat of their deathbed." 

Some Steal a Ride. They evade the fare by 
"riding the bumpers." They go through life as 
"blind baggage." The world has made an in- 
vestment in them to the extent of thousands of 
dollars for sustenance. The State has in- 
vested thousands more, to say nothing of life 
and blood, in their education. For this they 
make no return in benefits conferred. On the 
lowest rung of the social ladder they are called 
tramps. Higher up they are often called 
clever. 

Some Ride on a Pass. This pass is handed 
to them by others, usually ancestors, in the 
shape of money, position, or talent. Some one 
else pays their way, and they accept it com- 
placently as the proper thing. No sense of 
debt goes with it. Fortunately, such a free 



FARES, PLEASE! 9 

trip in a Pullman is no longer regarded as so 
praiseworthy an achievement as it once was. 
The inheritance tax, the income tax, the cor- 
poration tax, each is a loud stentorian, "Fares, 
please !" 

Some Ride on a Child's Ticket. They pay 
half fare. To the world's demand for a strong 
man's stint of work and service they plead- 
ingly insist that they are only twelve years 
old and must be let off with giving to the 
world a half portion as their share. They do 
not ask to be carried to the skies on flowery 
beds of ease; all they ask is to be allowed to 
go in a perambulator. 

Some Pay. These are the ones who make 
the world morally solvent. They take no 
delight in dodging. Their lives are lifted out 
of triviality and insignificance by the enno- 
bling power of a great obligation. They do 
not attempt to discharge their debt by merely 
becoming effective economic producers, for the 
world is more than a granary, a machine shop, 
a storehouse of commodities. It is a moral 
enterprise, the scene of the kingdom of God, a 
progressive advance in spiritual welfare. Its 
capital and stock in trade is not reckoned in 
pig iron and corn, but in moral purposes and 



10 FARES, PLEASE! 



spiritual ideals. For these they are debtor in 
honor bound to add to the world's spiritual 
resources. 

How do the debits and credits lie with us? 
There is in a Middle Western city a keen busi- 
ness man of high probity, one of the largest 
factors in its commercial life. He does not 
realize that the qualities that have won him 
success, the aggressive will, the alert mind, 
even his honesty, are the unearned increment 
and free gift of six generations of God-fearing 
New England ancestry. He prattles in a half- 
witted manner about being a self-made man. 
For the church and the welfare movements of 
his city he has no time. In plain language, he 
is stealing a ride through life without paying 
his fare. Here is another man in whose life 
the Sunday school has played an immeasur- 
able part. It helped to shape an impressionable 
boy into a responsible and upright man. In 
that institution he now takes only the most 
nominal interest. He cheerfully leaves the 
real work to be done by others whose youth 
and inexperience are only partly made up for 
by their zeal and devotion. He is trying to 
ride on a half -fare ticket. What shall we say 
of the multitude who owe the peace and purity 



FARES, PLEASE. 11 

of their homes, the whole core of their life's 
happiness and security, to the gospel and the 
church, and who think to cancel the obligation 
by a few patronizing words? 

What an irresistible force the church would 
have did it not have to carry so many who 
merely ride and do nothing else! We hear 
much good advice about keeping out of debt. 
Saint Paul has something better to offer. Get 
in debt ! Give your life the impetus of a reali- 
zation of that love so amazing, so divine that 
the whole realm of nature could never repay it. 
Only such an acknowledged obligation can 
redeem our lives from tawdriness and selfish- 
ness. "I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies 
of God." "I am debtor to the Greeks and to 
the Gentiles." 



II 

MASTEKS OF ARTS 

Helen Keller has in her autobiography a 
quaint observation regarding her college ex- 
aminations at Radcliffe, which will find an 
echo in every student's heart. "It is remark- 
able," she says, "the number of things one 
knows which are not in the examination 
paper." We have all sat in the hot schoolroom 
in June, biting the ends of our pens and star- 
ing blankly into space, wondering by what 
black, diabolic art the teacher, instead of ask- 
ing for any of the thousand and one things we 
knew perfectly, managed to pick out the small 
dozen which by some chance we were not able 
at the moment to recall. Nor does the wonder 
by any means end with our formal school days. 
The examination paper with which we are 
confronted in the larger school of experience 
has the same way of skipping the things we are 
best prepared on. Our passing grade depends 
on the mastery of arts which the textbooks 
hardly ever mentioned. We learn three or 

12 



MASTERS OF ARTS 13 

four languages, and have them at command, 
only to find out that the chief examination is 
on holding our tongue. We master three 
sciences, and then discover that the world lays 
nearly all its stress on the science of keeping 
our temper and getting along with people, 
which was never expounded to us out of the 
book. With our heads full of history we are 
examined on prophecy, the ability to foretell 
the probabilities of to-morrow and act with 
wisdom accordingly. 

To win the degree of Master of the Arts of 
Life is a far more considerable undertaking 
than to become a Master of Science. Bulk of 
information might fill the latter requirement, 
but a mastery of the finest of fine arts — that 
of living — is never to be achieved in some 
study "far from the madding crowd's ignoble 
strife," but in our contacts with people in the 
friction of the street and market place. The 
real demands of life which we must meet 
resemble with far more closeness the difficult 
achievements of a circus performer than they 
do the studious pursuits of a library. 

1. Standing on Your Head. Can you stand 
on your head? This is a strange question, but 
we find as we go along with the years that it 



14 FARES, PLEASE! 

counts about fifty per cent in the sum total of 
accomplishment. When young Disraeli was 
making his first campaign for Parliament a 
voice in the audience called out, "We know 
what the Whig candidate is standing on, and 
what the Tory candidate is standing on, but 
what are you standing on?" "I'm standing 
on my head," was his ready reply. In the 
eddies and cross-currents of modern life a 
clear head is the only secure standing ground. 
What distinguishes a lawyer of the first rank 
from the average one is the ability to dis- 
entangle from all the facts the essential point 
on which the case will turn, and carry it on 
that point. It was said of Rufus Choate that 
he had an "instinct for the artery." In like 
manner we need to be able to distinguish those 
courses which are thoroughfares to a goal 
worth reaching from those inviting paths 
which are only blind alleys. We stand on our 
head when we are not swung about by the 
gusts of passion, but can think things through 
to their final and logical outcome. The effect 
of city life has been well described as "a 
deliberate rush at every one of the five senses." 
It is a rush at the mind as well. Specious and 
plausible views of life demand our suffrage 



MASTERS OF ARTS 15 

under the terms of what Emerson said was 
Margaret Fuller's slogan — "I don't know 
where I'm going — Follow me!" Paul num- 
bered this among the indispensable arts. "In 
mind be men." "Be no more children, tossed 
to and fro, carried about with every wind of 
doctrine." Jesus continually threw men back 
on themselves by his question, "How does it 
seem to you?" It is a worthy ambition for a 
person to want to stand on his own feet. But 
that is only part of the battle. The larger 
half is to "stand on his own head." 

2. Walking the Tight Rope. A rare degree 
of physical skill is required in a man to keep 
himself moving along one small wire, holding 
his balance against the forces that would pull 
him to one side or the other. But the question 
whether we can walk the tight rope, hold our- 
selves in concentration along one line against 
distracting forces, is a cardinal one in life's 
test. Saint Paul mastered it — "This one thing 
I do." Thomas A. Edison did it, working for 
almost two years, sometimes sixteen hours a 
day, to make the first phonograph record the 
sound "sh." It is a large part of every notable 
career. Noah Webster worked thirty-six years 
on his Dictionary; Bancroft, twenty-six years 



16 PARES, PLEASE! 

on his History of the United States; Gibbon 
twenty years on The Decline and Fall of the 
Roman Empire; Michael Angelo took seven 
years to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling; 
Titian worked seven years on the Last Supper, 
and Da Vinci four years on the head of Mona 
Lisa. 

And what shall we say of Victor Hugo, who, 
when he was writing Notre Dame, sent all his 
clothing out of the house lest he be tempted 
to go out? or Thackeray, whose Vanity Fair 
was refused ten times? or, rising to a higher 
realm, of Robert Morrison and Henry Martyn, 
who worked heart-breaking years in China and 
India without a single convert? The measure 
of a man's soul is his ability to disregard the 
hindrances and concentrate his energy on the 
achievement; to put aside the accidents of a 
relation, a work, or opportunity and grasp the 
reality and hold to it. 

3. Building the Human Pyramid, This is 
a fine thing to see in a gymnasium or on the 
playgrounds. A number of men are standing 
in a haphazard group. Suddenly the whistle 
blows and each man falls into his place in 
adjustment with the others, and in a few sec- 
onds the unorganized mass becomes a sym- 



MASTERS OF ARTS 17 

metrical living pyramid. But it is a much 
finer thing to see in the lives of people built 
into the achievement of some common good. 
It is a truth that we fully learn only by ex- 
perience, that our net contribution to the 
world's good depends rather less on our indi- 
vidual endowment of genius or talent than on 
our ability to get along with folks, to hold our 
individual preferments in subordination to the 
larger purpose, and to endure even the harsh 
asperities of others for the sake of some shin- 
ing goal to be reached only through coopera- 
tion. It is easy enough to go along forcing 
others to adjust themselves to our moods, 
absolving ourselves by the reflection, "I am a 
plain, blunt man." When told that he must 
sit next a certain bishop at a dinner party, 
Henry Luttrell said, "I do not mix well with 
the Dean, but I should positively effervesce 
with the bishop." It is much easier to "effer- 
vesce" with uncongenial persons than to 
adjust ourselves to them in cooperative service. 
Lincoln never better illustrated that fine art of 
subordination of self by which he towered to 
greatness than in his saying, "I would hold 
McClellan's horse if it would bring us a vic- 
tory." For the sake of national unity, Yon 



18 FARES, PLEASE! 

Moltke, a naturally impulsive man, "could 
hold his tongue in seven languages." It was 
the fine art of Jesus, who for the joy that was 
set before him, endured the cross, despising the 
shame. 

Verily, art is long. Our hope would be 
small without the resources of the Head Mas- 
ter. We are not dependent on the teaching of 
formal precept, but ours is that same divine 
curriculum of companionship through which 
the impulsive Peter was graduated to a mag- 
nificent stability and the narrow and bigoted 
Paul became a living epistle of love. 



Ill 

ARE YOU A PERSON OF DISTINCTION? 

Are you listed in Who's Who? No? Then 
you can hardly be a person of distinction, for 
the advertisement claims it to be a biograph- 
ical dictionary of the "distinguished persons" 
in the United States. 

W T e do not like the invidious classification. 
It is artificial. Yet it is widely used by college 
authorities as a sort of rough index of success. 
To be listed in Who's Who in America is con- 
crete evidence that you have "arrived." On 
the basis of this book, to go to college is to 
increase your chances of "arriving" by one 
thousand per cent. 

It has a certain real value in stating in 
graphic terms the advantage education gives 
for achievement in life. Yet when one con- 
siders what real distinction in life must be, 
how outward and mechanical such a basis is ! 
Carlyle rightly protests that we pay too much 
attention to a person's outward trappings. We 
bow profoundly and say, "Good morning, 

19 



20 FARES, PLEASE! 

Clothes," "Good morning, Medals," when what 
we ought to recognize and honor is the thing 
beneath and say, "Good morning, Soul." 

The rank is but the guinea stamp, 
The man's the gowd for a' that. 

A man coming out from a banquet recently 
said to a companion, "Do you know that there 
was represented at that banquet wealth to the 
amount of about thirty million dollars?" 
"Yes," was the ready answer, "and conversa- 
tion to the amount of about thirty cents." The 
distinction was all on the outside. 

What are the final and valid marks of a 
person of real distinction? Laying aside such 
things as certificates of deposit, membership 
in clubs, college degrees, and dress suits — be- 
cause, like the celebrated "flowers that bloom 
in the spring," they have nothing to do with 
the case — what remains? Can we find a more 
ready and serviceable gauge than the one 
Henry van Dyke has given : 

Four things a man must learn to do 
If he would keep his record true: 
To think without confusion clearly, 
To love his fellow men sincerely, 
To act from honest motives purely, 
And trust in God and heaven securely. 



A PERSON OF DISTINCTION? 21 

1. "To think without confusion clearly." 
Surely, this would make one distinguished in 
any company. Most men bolt their opinions 
as they do their food. Their ideas are as much 
prepared and predigested as their breakfast 
food. The newspaper, the popular catchword, 
the shopworn proverb — these become so 
readily our substitutes for mental self-direc- 
tion. President Wilson said recently, "As 
never before, we are living in a confused 
world." Moral issues are clouded. The person 
who thinks at second- or third-hand gets easily 
lost. To have a clear personal grasp of the 
principles of Jesus, to know their meaning in 
terms of the day's work and problems, to be 
able to separate the kernel from the husk of 
truth — here is distinction! 

2. "To love your fellow man sincerely." 
There are four ways of loving our fellow men. 
Three of them are very easy. One is the hazy 
way, very popular. It gives a certain emo- 
tional satisfaction to cherish a vague and airy 
sentimentalism about men. It prompts to no 
action. It lays no cross on one's life. It does 
not deal in concrete people ; it prates airily of 
"humanity." Another is the interested way, 
to love those whom it pays to cultivate. An- 



22 FARES, PLEASE! 

other is to spend the whole of one's affection 
within the charmed circle of kindred and con- 
genial spirits. Christian love is not any of 
these. It comes from a belief in men's worth ; 
is built on their needs. The "interesting" man 
to Jesus was the man in need, not, as is so 
often the case with us, the talented, the clever, 
the congenial. To love sincerely is to find all 
need interesting. 

3. "To act from honest motives purely." 
That means to be convinced that God cares 
most of all for the quality of the inner life; 
to know, as Maltbie Babcock put it, "To be 
faithless is to fail, whatever the apparent suc- 
cess of earth ; to be faithful is to succeed, what- 
ever the apparent failure of earth." 

4. "To trust in God and heaven securely" 
"If you believe in God," wrote Robert Louis 
Stevenson, "where is there any room for 
terror? If you are sure that God, in the long 
run, means kindness to you, you should be 
happy." 

There is only one Who's Who in America 
that signifies. It is the Lamb's Book of Life. 



IV 
DOORKEEPERS 

"The church needs a few ushers, but we 
can't all 'ush' ; there is room for about a dozen 
deacons, but we can't all of us 'deac' What 
shall the rest of us do?" 

So ran the perplexed query of a layman dur- 
ing the Men and Religion Movement. 

Why not be doorkeepers ? 

We think of the confession of David, "I had 
rather be a doorkeeper in the house of the 
Lord than to dwell in the tents of wickedness," 
as a beautiful statement of the truth that 
even the lowest place in the service of God 
ranks higher than any station outside of it. 
But when we think of what the function of 
the doors of the church really is, in the largest 
sense, the office of doorkeeper, instead of being 
a minor and incidental one, looms large. 

The final problem of a church is not one of 
finances or even of audiences. It has to do 
with doors. It is the problem of keeping its 
doors swinging inward, so that it may receive 
and grow; and swinging outward, so that it 
may give forth in ministry. 

23 



24 FARES, PLEASE! 



Some church doors do not swing at all. 
Their motto is "Statu Quo." New faces in the 
pew, new names on the roll, new tasks laid 
upon the heart — these come only like the rare 
visits of Halley's comet. They frequently 
speak of holding their own, sweetly oblivious 
of the fact that in the realm of living things 
there is not to be found such a preposterous 
anomaly as anything merely holding its own. 

Some church doors swing only inward. 
They do not truly represent One w T ho came not 
to be ministered unto but to minister. They 
are centripetal forces in a community — draw- 
ing to themselves. They are rarely ever con- 
sciously selfish, but lack vision. Very insidi- 
ously the achievement of a church's maintain- 
ing itself in health becomes an end in itself. 

The doors of a church must be kept open 
so that the wind, the breath, the Spirit of God 
may fill it. Frequently we enter a church 
building which has been closed for a week and 
sense the mustiness and heaviness of the air. 
What a tonic it is to fling wide the door so 
that a fresh breeze may vitalize the atmos- 
phere! Now, in the conduct of worship there 
abideth these three — art, music, and air; but 
the greatest of these is air. A minister paused 



DOORKEEPERS 25 

in a service ouce, saying, "We will now con- 
tinue the worship of God by opening the win- 
dows." He was not irreverent. In that case 
it was the indispensable condition of worship. 
Chrysostom himself is no match for carbon 
dioxide. 

The same truth lights our way as we go on 
in our thought from the church as a building 
to the church as a fellowship of believers. The 
people who cannot be spared are those whose 
spirit, prayers, and eager sympathies are door- 
ways through which that breath of God which 
swept over the hearts of men at Pentecost and 
touched them into life may find access to men. 
Such people create a spiritual climate, free 
from the nipping frost of cant and warm with 
sincerity, in which it is as normal and natural 
for a soul to open out to God as it is for a 
valley to blossom under the breath of June. 
It is a very easy thing for a minister to say 
from the pulpit, "The doors of the church are 
now open." Whether it is true or not is quite 
another thing. That depends on the door- 
keepers. 

It is a work of eternal vigilance to keep the 
doors of the church open to the sounds of the 
world's need and pain. The president of the 



26 FARES, PLEASE! 



New York Society for the Prevention of Un- 
necessary Noise has had constructed in her 
residence on Riverside Drive a sound-proof 
room. Below in the streets is the ceaseless jar 
of the world's life. Still below that is the 
shriek and rumble of the railroad traffic on the 
water level. But into that sound-proof room 
no wrangling note of turmoil ever penetrates. 
It is a sobering thought that the church may 
easily become such a sound-proof room, admit- 
ting into its confines of quietness and content 
no disturbing reminders of the world's aching 
heart and sin. "Peace, Perfect Peace," may 
be its only anthem, so that it forgets to turn 
over the page to the less sedative strains of 
"Rescue the Perishing." God never speaks so 
directly to his church as through the deep- 
throated voice of the world's misery, and every 
member who by his sympathies enables the 
church to continually hear the "still, sad 
music of humanity," lays upon its heart the 
restless urge which the fellowship of his 
sufferings brings. 

Open my heart to music; let 

Me thrill with spring's first lutes and drums; 
But never let me dare forget 

The bitter ballads of the slums. 



DOORKEEPERS 27 

A doorkeeper lets the doors of the church 
swing outward, so that lives which have felt 
the impression of the Master's Spirit may go 
out to expression in his service. After the first 
sermon at Capernaum Jesus "went from the 
synagogue into the house" — there to carry the 
truth he had himself spoken, through the heal- 
ing hand on the fevered brow. Through doors 
that swing outward the church emerges to 
sacrificial activity, "the creed of creeds, the 
ministry of loving deeds." 



IS GOD ON YOUR VISITING LIST? 

A recent novelist has eloquently described 
the religion of one of his characters in the 
sentence, "She had God on her visiting list." 

Nothing could be added by enlarging on the 
theme for a whole chapter. It aptly describes, 
not only that particular woman, but also 
the widespread formal, polite conventionality 
which so often masquerades as religion. It 
reminds us of the statement in the obituary 
notice of an English squire : "He was not in- 
terested in religion, but in all other respects 
he was a consistent Protestant." 

A great many people have God on their 
visiting list. Their relation to their Creator 
is polite and respectful. It adheres to the lines 
of good form. It is sustained with about the 
same warmth and from something of the same 
motives that one keeps in touch with a rich 
uncle from whom he has distant expectations. 
It is this attitude which gave rise to the 
observation that many people took their Chris- 
tianity like vaccination for smallpox, taking 

23 



IS GOD ON YOUR VISITING LIST? 29 

just enough to prevent them from catching the 
disease. 

The social forms by which many people pay 
their religious duty are varied. 

1. The Occasional Call. It is bad form to 
neglect one's calling list. Smith aims to call 
on Jones every so often ; he does not want to let 
Cousin George, who is a little sensitive, and 
to whom it pays to show attention, feel that 
he is forgotten. So he calls there. Likewise 
he goes to church on Easter and Christmas, 
perhaps also on Children's Day. Or he goes 
with the lodge to the Memorial Service and 
lives in a glow of righteous exaltation for six 
months. In a very different sense from the 
prophet Elijah, "In the strength of that meat 
he goes forty days." 

2. The Week-End Visit This is popular as 
a religious as well as a social institution. The 
rest of the week need not take its cue too 
slavishly from Sunday. The week-end visit at 
church concludes; "To-morrow to new fields 
and pastures new." As the somewhat terrible 
cynicism of Bliss Carman's poem, "Grass," puts 
it: 

They're praising God on Sunday, 
They'll he all right on Monday, 
It's just a little hahit they've acquired. 



30 FARES, PLEASE! 

A couple came to a Chicago minister to be 
married. The groom asked if it would be 
proper for them to kneel down and pray, and 
on being told that it would be very fitting, 
inquired how long they should pray. "O, that 
is for you to judge," said the minister, "just 
a short prayer." Then the groom had a sud- 
den inspiration. "I'll kneel down and count 
twelve," he said. We smile, and yet that is a 
very common idea of prayer — kneeling down 
and counting twelve, or pronouncing other 
words equally meaningful ; just going through 
the motions. It bears the same relation to real 
worship that slipping your calling card under 
the door bears to communion with a friend. 

3. The Annual Visit. This has its vogue. 
It frequently comes in Lent. It is a regular 
affair, just as the children go out to Aunt 
Mary's for two weeks every summer. It is a 
good thing, for frequently such a concentra- 
tion of religious thought and practice is a tide 
which taken at the flood leads on to spiritual 
fortune. The trouble is that so often after 
the flood recedes the beach is left totally high 
and dry. After Easter we take the decorations 
down. We stack up the gilded lettering, "He 
is Risen," away behind the coal bin in the 



IS GOD ON YOUR VISITING LIST? 31 

church cellar, to be used next year perhaps. A 
sad symbol of the treatment accorded the 
Easter truth. The living truth, "He is risen," 
is frequently dismantled and tucked away in 
an unused corner of the mind. 

4. The Sick Call. This call is all that God 
ever receives from some. Too busy in health, 
he is on their visiting list only in affliction. 
Then "they call upon the Lord in their 
trouble." What a ghastly relation to him 
whose mercies are new every morning and who 
would daily bear our burden ! 

Jesus said, "Abide in me." He did not say, 
"Visit me occasionally." We abide when we 
do all things as unto him, squared with his 
purpose, directed by his Spirit. When we 
abide we rejoice. "If ye abide, ... ye shall 
ask . . . and it shall be done." When we 
abide we bear fruit. "He that abideth in me, 
the same beareth much fruit." 



VI 
THINKING IN A CIRCLE 

Dr. Richard C. Cabot, in that amazingly 
suggestive book, What Men Live By, describes 
with a fine insight a common mental process 
which easily tends to become a fixed habit 
unless it is checked. He calls it "thinking in 
a circle" and gives a very convincing diagram 
and illustration which holds the mirror up to 
our own nature. Here is the way the merry- 
go-round in a man's mind frequently runs: 
"(1) I must find some work; (2) Am I fit for 
any? (3) How lonely it is to be one of the 
unfit ! ( 4 ) This loneliness is killing me. ( 5 ) 
I can't stand it, so ( 1 ) I must find some work," 
etc. Thus the mind runs around the dizzy 
circle. 

"Vacillation," he says, "has the same circu- 
lar character or pendulous swing." Here is 
the inside working of another piece of mental 
machinery: "(1) I guess I'll buy some stock 

32 



THINKING IN A CIRCLE 33 

at once, but (2) the price may fall. (3) I 
guess it's safer not to buy now. (4) But 
there is a splendid chance to get rich if I 
buy now, so (1) I guess I'll buy some stock," 
etc. 

"Break away! Think straight in some 
direction !" This advice, we all recognize, is a 
big improvement on endless swinging around 
the circle. But how to do it — there lies the 
rub ! General Robert E. Lee had often to face 
the problem in the concrete form in which it 
comes to all of us. After long hours of work- 
ing on the details of some piece of military 
strategy, he would often seek out Longstreet 
and say : "I need a tangent. My mind has got 
to working in a circle." In the counsel of that 
alert and friendly mind he found the tangent 
that led him straight to some decision. 

A wise friend may often serve as a needed 
tangent. "Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man 
sharpeneth the countenance of his friend." 
But there is a Friend who sticketh closer than 
a brother, with whom the ultimate solution of 
the problem lies. 

Worry does its greatest damage through the 
vicious character of its circular swing. It 
accomplishes nothing but the breaking down 



34 FARES, PLEASE! 



of the brain cells and the dimming of the 
native hue of resolution of the spirit. "It's 
not the jumping hurdles that hurts the horses' 
feet," said a wise stable groom. "It's the 
hammer, hammer, hammer on the hard high- 
ways." Many a mind which has met great 
issues and crises bravely and serenely is 
broken down by a succession of ignoble cares. 
The anxious foreboding within the closed 
circle of the same thorny problem speedily 
robs us of the mood of victory. 

Jesus gave himself unreservedly to meeting 
this aspect of men's lives. To replace a vitiat- 
ing worry by a confident trust he ever reck- 
oned among first things. In his revelation of 
the good purposes of the Father, and the 
Father's knowledge and love of his children, 
he gave men a tangent which led them out to 
freedom and peace. When one is lost in the 
woods and is traveling in a circle the best 
thing to do is to climb a tree and get one's 
bearings and so bring to a confused mind the 
steadying power of a long perspective. That 
is just what filial trust does as we catch its 
contagion from Jesus. It does not dislodge 
all difficulties or solve all perplexities. These 
remain. But trust gives a new might with 



THINKING IN A CIRCLE 35 

which to deal with them, a readiness to do our 
best and leave the issue with him. To know 
that God's 

greatness flows around our incompleteness, 
Round our restlessness, his rest, 

is to emerge from circles into the saving health 
of straight lines. 

Temptation waxes strong in circles. It is 
the repeated insistence of an image returning 
to the mind which finally carries away resist- 
ance like the undermining of a dyke by a 
spring freshet. The mind returns to the allur- 
ing temptation as the bird circles around the 
serpent. As we look at the life of the Master 
we see how again and again the same tempta- 
tions that assailed him in the wilderness recur. 
Yet he did not lose his way. He always found 
the will of his Father the straight line which 
led him unerringly to the mark of his high 
calling. With every temptation there is a way 
of escape. Joseph found it. "How can I do 
this great wickedness and sin against God?" 
Peter found it. "We must obey God rather 
than man." 

Edward Rowland Sill gives us a clue toward 
changing little circles into noble highways ; 



36 FARES, PLEASE! 

Forenoon and afternoon and night, forenoon 
And afternoon and night, forenoon and — what? 
The empty song repeats itself — no more? 
Yes, this is life. Make this forenoon sublime, 
This afternoon a psalm, this night a prayer, 
And time is conquered and thy crown is won. 



VII 
THE GIANT THRILLER 

"Mother," said a little boy, as lie stepped 
off the roller coaster at Coney Island, between 
gasps as his jumping heart settled back from 
his throat to its normal place, "I'd like to live 
on a Giant Thriller." He looked back long- 
ingly at the great serpentine curves over 
which he had just traveled with such tingling 
sensations to heart and head. 

No doubt we have all at times shared his 
wish. And a great many children of a larger 
growth continue to cherish the desire in one 
form or another, long after they have ceased 
to give it such frank expression. 

Life to a large number of people is just that 
— a Giant Thriller. It holds just so much 
"permanent possibility of sensation." Its 
final end is not so much the destination it 
reaches as the number and degree of thrills, 
excitement, and pleasure which the ups and 
downs of the journey may be made to yield. 
It is a sort of colossal amusement resort in 

37 



38 FABES, PLEASE! 

which the modern Shylock whets the edge of 
his appetite and demands, not his pound of 
flesh, but his hour of stimulated thrill. Some 
one said of Whistler that he always lived up 
to his emotional income. To be really able 
to do that in a crude way, to fill one's days 
with the greatest number and variety of elec- 
tric shocks and have its dull and quiet hours 
figure as the occasional period amid a long 
and bright succession of exclamation points — 
this is the chief end of man according to the 
(very much) Shorter Catechism of the multi- 
tude. 

This modern quest of a thrill, unlike the 
spirit of intelligent adventure in "the spacious 
days of the great Elizabeth," is not a noble 
one. Its cheap and tawdry scene is for a large 
part the saloon, the theater, the dance hall, 
the erotic novel, the moving pictures. He 
would be blind who failed to see the real social 
service and possibilities of moving pictures. 
He would be blind too who failed to see in 
many of them the unwholesome refuge of 
vacant and rapidly disintegrating minds. Its 
cheap terrors, crude substitutes for humor and 
vulgarization of love are forces yet to be reck- 
oned with. Life as a roller coaster of pleasur- 



THE GIANT THRILLER 39 

able thrills, refine the character of the thrills 
as one may, is still a poor thing. It makes thin 
souls, flabby, irresponsible, and stupid. 

The Merry -Go-Round is another of the peo- 
ple's playthings which represent a real and 
common attitude to life. It is not charac- 
terized by the ardent chase of pleasure. It is 
the unthinking and limp acceptance of a little 
track of routine and convention which sends 
one day around the same circle as another. 
Each day has the same thoughts, as the barrel 
organ has the same tunes. This circle is by 
no means a depraved one. A great many thor- 
oughly upright and likable people act on the 
assumption of life being a more or less aimless 
spinning around the same groove in which 
their part is to get as comfortably fixed and 
pass the time as pleasantly as possible. But 
this assumption carries a great liability — dis- 
appointment. This complaint was voiced not 
long ago very exactly : "I've spent all my life 
making money to get food to eat and clothes 
to wear. The food doesn't agree with me and 
the clothes don't fit. I guess I must be a 
failure." He certainly was! One may come 
to the end of the most placid and unruffled 
existence conceivable, but if his life has never 



40 FARES, PLEASE! 

been stirred by noble aspirations, lie may cast 
bis final ballot with Macbeth : 

It is a tale 
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
Signifying nothing. 

It seems strange that any one in his right 
senses should wish to ride on the "bump the 
bumps " It is a long slide broken here and 
there by round protrusions, against which one 
is violently thrown if he does not steer clear 
of them. No doubt it is the balked disposition 
of fear which finds gratification and makes 
the ride popular. 

Is it too much of an extravagance to say 
that the aim of life to some is to avoid as 
many of its risks of misfortune and trouble as 
possible? This world, it seems, is a vale of 
tears; trouble comes to all. Hence the art 
of life consists in skillfully missing as many 
of its bumps as you may. This conceives of 
happiness in the wholly negative terms of 
escape. And, of course, it misses it com- 
pletely, for happiness is never negative; it is 
always positive. It is never the mere avoid- 
ance of evil ; it is always the presence of active 
good. What shall it profit a man if he escapes 



THE GIANT THRILLER 41 

every conceivable misfortune, if at the same 
time lie misses everything else. Peabody says 
finely of Jesus, "Joy and sorrow were never 
ends to be gained or avoided ; they become the 
mere rhythm of his step as he moves steadily 
toward his supreme desire." It is as vain to 
compute the success of life in terms of the 
disagreeable things escaped as to reckon it by 
the empty hours of sleep. 

A truer symbol of life which the playground 
afforded was an old cloth-covered prairie 
schooner preserved as an adjunct to a Wild 
West show. Here was the relic of a great 
adventure in faith, hope, and love, and as such 
a symbol of life defined in its highest terms. 
The pioneer who went out, like Abraham, "not 
knowing whither he went," yet daring to be- 
lieve in the future, a gentleman unafraid of 
the bright face of danger, impelled by the love 
of family and kin to give them a little better 
stake in life than he began with — this man 
lived. And as he journeyed, taking both joy 
and sorrow as incidental risks of the road, he 
cleared the way for another, so that he did 
not 

alone 
Conquer and come to his goal, 
Leaving the rest in the wild, 



42 FARES, PLEASE! 

This is the life to which our Master calls us, 
a sharing in the adventure of love which 
chooses the spiritual in place of the merely 
sensual and economic. It is a pathway of joy 
incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not 
away. 



VIII 
ON THE LINE OF DISCOVERY 

Among all the tributes that have been paid 
to Gladstone, one that comes nearest to the 
secret of the abounding vigor and freshness 
of his ninety-year span of life was the remark 
of John Morley : "He kept himself on the line 
of discovery." At an age when most men 
twenty years his junior were completely occu- 
pied with the reminiscences of distant years, 
his heart and mind were busy with the prob- 
lems of to-morrow. It is a phrase which in- 
terprets the interest and achievement of any 
life. 

The zest of life lies in its ventures. Kipling 
has put into classic form in his "Pioneer" a 
man who lived on the line of discovery : 

"There's no use in going farther, it's the edge of culti- 
vation." 
So they said and I believed it; broke my ground and 
sowed my crop; 
Built my barns and strung my fences in a little border 
station 
Hid away beneath the foothills where the trails run 
out and stop. 

43 



44 FARES, PLEASE! 

But a voice as clear as conscience rang interminable 
changes 
On one everlasting whisper, day and night-repeated 
— so — 
"Something out there, something hidden — Go and look 
behind the ranges! 
Something lost behind the ranges — Lost and waiting 
for you — Go!" 

So he leaves the comforts of a settled farm, for 
hardship and privation, drawn by the insistent 
lure of discovery. 

We all begin life on the line of discovery. 
The world is new every morning and every 
day a fresh delight. The magical storage 
battery of curiosity supplies endless energy 
to every faculty. The greatest loss in the years 
that follow is not so much that they bring the 
philosophic mind, as that with their more 
settled aspect we allow the familiar outline 
of our little world to become a twice-told tale 
and stop discovering. One of the characters 
in a story by O. Henry says of the town in 
which he lives, "The trouble with this place 
is that everybody in it dies when they get 
about twenty-one, and they don't do anything 
but snore and toss around in their sleep the 
rest of their lives." It is a case of the tree 
about which one can say, "It grows," becoming 



ON THE LINE OF DISCOVERY 45 

the flag pole about which all that can be said 
is "It grew." 

With unerring instinct Jesus waged con- 
tinual war on self-satisfaction as the great 
arch enemy of growth. His parable of the full 
storehouse, in which the man who says to his 
soul that he has goods laid up for many years 
finds that in that very hour his life is gone, 
is one that finds daily application. It is true 
of the teacher. When he stops learning and 
trusts to doling out the same parcels of his 
fixed stock of knowledge, that very day his 
spontaneity, freshness, and contagion, his very 
life as a teacher, is gone, and another routine 
machine is added to the world's already over- 
stocked supply. It is the sad tragedy in the 
life of the preacher or other professional man 
which we call "the dead line." 

Christianity was first called "the Way" be- 
fore any formal name was given to the reli- 
gion of Jesus. It states Christian discipleship 
in the right manner — in terms of motion. 
Rightly apprehended, being a Christian is not 
so much a process of anchoring one's soul in 
the haven of rest as it is of sailing the seas 
with God. It keeps men on the line of dis- 
covery. 



46 FARES, PLEASE! 

Prayer is a sure line for the discovery of 
God and the exploration of the hidden self. 
Jesus's idea of prayer lifts it out of the realm 
of a bargain-counter transaction with the 
world's Storekeeper into that of communion 
with the Father. Prayer is to religion what 
experiment is to science. It is the personal 
verification of hypotheses and probabilities. 
Acting on the faith that God is, it finds him. 
The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous 
man is like the little Santa Maria setting out 
from the port of Spain on a great voyage of 
discovery. And as the evidence that it has 
really discovered the Father it brings back 
the wonderful treasure of a changed life — new 
powers brought to light in the hidden conti- 
nent of the soul. 

By service we keep ourselves on fresh path- 
ways. "Men grow quickly on battlefields," 
said a wise French campaigner. We find our- 
selves through responsibility and effort. Gen- 
eral Grant, a failure in the tannery at Galena, 
only came to himself under the spur of Shiloh 
and Vicksburg. 

By the cultivation of active sympathies life 
is kept out of blind alleys. It is a faithful 
saying and worthy of all acceptation that a 



ON THE LINE OF DISCOVERY 47 

loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge. 
Sympathy is the rarest form of travel. What 
travel does for an alert mind, quickening the 
sense of life, replacing a threadbare set of 
thoughts with new interests, putting ourselves 
in the place of another with sympathetic con- 
cern does for the soul. When the prophet 
Ezekiel, depressed and melancholy in an alien 
land, entered into the lives of his fellow exiles, 
and "sat down where they sat," the somber 
hues of dejection and despair which had 
colored all his thinking gave way to the posi- 
tive shades of love and faith. We speak com- 
placently of "mellow old age," as though it 
were mellow of necessity. It is just as apt 
to be sour. It will be sour and the heart 
shriveled, unless it finds new leaseholds on 
freshness and unselfishness by a real stake in 
the lives of others. 

After all, there is only one sure line of dis- 
covery. It is itself one of the great spiritual 
discoveries of Jesus — "He that loseth his life 
shall find it." 



IX 
GETTING INTO SOCIETY 

Getting into Society is a popular game. 

During wars and rumors of wars we are 
continually regaled with vivid accounts of the 
invasion of New York by some possible enemy. 
But these highly imaginative invasions are 
never so interesting as the real invasion of 
the city which goes on every year. There is 
the invasion from Europe, running into the 
hundred thousands; the invasion from the 
country of young men and women, coming up 
to seek their fortune in the whirlpool. And 
much less noble, but not less real, the yearly 
invasion of people who have made their for- 
tune in other places and who seek the city to 
"break into Society." 

It is played with the most feverish spirit 
by those who lack most conspicuously any 
inner standards of worth, and who must keep 
alive their sense of personal significance by 
all sorts of outward recognition. This abode 
of the Blessed, the Elysian fields of Society 

43 



GETTING INTO SOCIETY 49 

with a big S, has been well compared to the 
ladderlike arrangement of the Hindu caste 
system, where one must kiss the feet of the one 
above and kick the face of the one beneath. 
So the gentle art of snobbery goes on to new 
refinements among those whose only measure 
of personal position is the wholly negative one 
of exclusiveness. 

It is a game for small stakes, which Thack- 
eray has pictured in immortal fashion in 
Vanity Fair. "What I want to make," he 
w r rote to his mother, speaking of the novel, "is 
a set of people living without God in the 
world, only that is a cant phrase." How well 
he succeeded, Lord Steyne, Sir Pitt Crawley, 
poor stupid Joe Sedley, and Becky, above all, 
answer in their own way. 

To dress, to call, to dine, to break 

No canon of the social code, 
The little laws that lackeys make, 

The futile decalogue of mode — 
How many a soul for these things lives 

With pious passion, grave intent! 
And never even in dreams has seen 

The things that are more excellent! 

Yet the very object of this trivial game, when 
conceived in a true manner, may be made one 



50 FARES, PLEASE! 

of the largest and most worthy aims in life. 
To get one into society that is really worth 
getting into is the end both of education and 
religion. Education is a process of social ad- 
justment. Its aim is to develop the individual 
and bring him into the most helpful social 
relationship with his fellows. It is a large 
function of religion to lead men into inspiring 
fellowship with great souls, and to initiate 
them into the great society of the helpers of 
the race. 

Books are a sure and lasting means of get- 
ting into good society. A well-selected library 
is a gathering of the great, admittance into 
whose intimacy brings more real honor than 
all the court levees ever held. "The Four 
Hundred" most worth cultivating are not 
dressed in silk and spangled with diamonds; 
they are bound in leather and studded with 
gleaming thoughts. Some one has said of a 
group of young radicals in England that they 
climbed back stairs to dark attics and shut 
themselves in with the gods. One who in his 
library has never been "stung with the splen- 
dor of a sudden thought" has much to learn 
about good society. The real beginning of the 
true life of Keats was when as a boy the 



GETTING INTO SOCIETY 51 

entrance into the society of Homer's gallery 
of heroes was as though "a new planet swung 
into his ken." Here is where the Bible serves 
the race in such transcendent manner. The 
surest anchorage of our lives in times of be- 
wilderment and the strongest lodestar in times 
of action is in its great souls. The man who 
knows Paul, whose heart is no stranger to 
the enthusiasm of Isaiah or to the devotion 
of John, who, above all, knows the moods and 
spirit of Jesus, is in good society. 

The communion of saints — the fellowship of 
the redeemed — is the greatest society on earth. 
That grand old schoolmaster of Rugby, Dr. 
Arnold, once said, "Whenever I can receive 
into my care a boy fresh from his father, with- 
out emotion, it is high time for me to be off." 
No familiarity ever robbed him of the sense 
of the glory of his vocation. Whenever we 
can look at the familiar sight of a person join- 
ing the church, without feeling emotion, it is 
high time for us to be off too. 

It is our reddest red-letter day when we get 
into that society whose names are written on 
His hands. When Jerry McAuley was so 
gloriously converted down in Water Street 
there was no mention of the fact in the society 



52 FARES, PLEASE! 

columns in the New York newspapers. It was 
the greatest social event of the year, neverthe- 
less. He had joined the immortals who here 
on earth were living in the power of an end- 
less life. At one time when Mark Twain had 
received an invitation to dine with the em- 
peror of Germany, his little daughter said, 
innocently, to him, "You'll soon know every- 
body except God, won't you, papa?" There 
was real pathos in the question. What mat- 
ters a dozen kings or so on our calling list, if 
it is to be a case of "everybody except God"? 

Have you ever joined the International 
Order of the Helpers of Men? It has never 
been unanimously popular. It was founded 
by One who is still regarded as a trifle eccen- 
tric in many quarters. Its charter reads : "Let 
him that is great among you be your minister." 
The Roman satirist, Lucian, long ago pointed 
out the fact that its basic idea was absurd — 
that of being brothers. But it includes those 
of whom the world is not worthy. O, if with 
the thousand and one lodges and societies we 
belong to, we would only join the human race 
— feel the pulse of its brotherhood, its twinge 
of pain as our own and lay its burden on our 
shoulders! When we get into that company 



GETTING INTO SOCIETY 53 

we do not merely ornament a drawing room 
for an hour, but shine as the stars, forever and 
ever. 

"There is one great society on earth, the 
noble living and the noble dead." 



X 

THE SUNNY SIDE OF TEN 

"Of such is the kingdom of heaven." 

Most of us remember some lines back in our 
old copybooks, which ran like this : 

Give to the world the best that you have, 
And the best will come back to you. 

In no place is the old truth so true as in the 
entrance requirement of the kingdom of God, 
"Except ye become as little children, ye shall 
not enter the kingdom of God." The Master 
demands the very best we have — the childlike 
qualities of teachableness and faith. It is an 
inexorable condition that we bring these. But 
the return which he makes, good measure, 
pressed down and running over, is that he 
enables us to keep unwithered by age and un- 
spoiled by custom those very qualities of child- 
hood. To be a member of the Kingdom is to 
keep oneself forever on the sunny side of ten. 

James Russell Lowell, when passing once, in 
the outskirts of Boston, a building which bore 

54 



THE SUNNY SIDE OF TEN 55 

the inscription, "Home for Incurable Chil- 
dren," said, playfully, to a friend, "They'll get 
me in there some day." That is just what he 
was — an incurable child, carrying over into 
his last years an irrepressible youthfulness of 
heart. That is what a real member of the 
Kingdom is — an incurable child. 

On the sunny side of ten there is an atmos- 
phere of trust. Have you ever thought of how 
much of the glory of childhood comes from the 
unruffled calm of its trust? It is only gradu- 
ally that we come to realize that the years 
that set as lightly on our shoulders as a June 
breeze were years of intense strain and re- 
sponsibility to our fathers and mothers. The 
child's world is a garden of delight because 
its boundless trust makes everything in it 
bloom as a spring day touches a valley and 
calls forth its beauty. Unsophisticated cre- 
dulity is a childish thing, to be put away when 
one becomes a man. But a childlike trust is 
part of our permanent inheritance as joint 
heirs of Jesus Christ. "He careth for you." 
"He knoweth our frame." "He knoweth the 
way that I take." "He knoweth you have need 
of these things." A doctor told a student who 
complained of headaches and whose window 



56 FAEES, PLEASE! 

looked off into empty space that he needed 
something in his view to "lean his eyes np 
against." It is a good thing to lean our eyes 
up against the background of the God and 
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

The child lives in the present. To a child 
on a picnic there has been no yesterday ; there 
will be no to-morrow. "One crowded hour of 
glorious life" is his. He is unvexed by past 
regrets or future fears, while we, his elders, 
live so largely in the day before yesterday or 
the middle of next week. Dr. William Osier 
tells us the problem of happiness is a very 
simple one. It consists merely in pressing 
two buttons, one of which shuts off the past 
and the other shuts off the future. Two 
buttons, that is all. So beautifully simple! 
It is too bad that he neglects to tell us just 
hoAV to do it! He who has the keys of life 
and death is the only one who can push the 
buttons. "As a thick cloud have I blotted out 
thy transgressions" ; that is the only assurance 
which can shut out the peace-destroying past. 
"I will not leave thee nor forsake thee"; that 
is what lifts the cloud of future fears. The 
Christian who is persuaded that He is able to 
keep that which he has committed unto Him, 



THE SUNNY SIDE OF TEN 57 

may live as fully in the present as the most 
care-free child. The Jewish religion in the 
time of Christ knew only two days — yester- 
day and to-morrow. It is highly significant 
that the first recorded word of Jesus's public 
ministry was the word "to-day." "To-day" is 
the day of salvation, of opportunity, of joy. 

On the sunny side of ten we live in an ideal 
world. 

When I was a beggarly boy 

And lived in a cellar damp, 
I had not a friend nor a toy, 

But I had Aladdin's lamp. 
When I could not sleep for the cold, 

I had fire enough in my brain, 
And builded with roofs of gold 

My beautiful castles in Spain. 

The world is full, then, of ideal personages 
and ideal forces. Prince Charming may ap- 
pear from around the corner at any time. The 
pot of gold is at the end of the rainbow if we 
only hurry fast enough. The youthful Cole- 
ridge walking down the street, swinging his 
arms wildly, accidentally hits an old gentle- 
man on the head and pauses politely to ex- 
plain that he is cutting off the heads of Turk- 
ish infidels with his scimitar. From this realm 
of the ideal we emerge into what is called the 



58 FARES, PLEASE! 

real world, and a glory has departed. But 
the man of Christian faith, to whom God and 
the increasing purpose which runs through the 
ages are realities, lives in an ideal world. 
Creation to him is not a dreary mechanism of 
interlocked wheels, for the earnest expectation 
of the creature waiteth for the manifestation 
of the sons of God. His Kingdom is an ever- 
lasting Kingdom, and its members have the 
dew of their youth. 

Ponce de Leon set out in the wrong direc- 
tion to discover the fountain of youth. It is 
not in the everglades of Florida. It is the 
eternal spring, a "well by the gate" in Beth- 
lehem of Judsea. 



XI 
A BINET TEST FOR DEFECTIVES 

Society is at last beginning to pay some 
attention to its ill-favored stepchildren. Re- 
versing the policy of centuries of giving nearly 
all its thought and care to its promising off- 
spring, it is acting on the discovery that 
schools should be not alone for the exceptional 
boy or girl, or even for the normal child. Its 
latest venture is in schools for the backward, 
the defective and subnormal. By looking at 
their needs, not with the eyes of unthinking 
tradition, but with intelligence lighted by 
love, it is doing wonderful things in preparing 
for life the crippled in body and mind. 

The first step in such a work is to find out 
the degree of mental normality of a child. One 
of the most approved and scientific methods 
is what is known as the "Binet Test for Defec- 
tives," so called from its inventor. It consists 
of a number of simple questions and opera- 
tions which readily disclose the degree of 
deficiency of eyesight or hearing, keenness of 

59 



60 FARES, PLEASE! 

observation, muscular response, and power of 
mental coordination. On the basis of this test 
the means and methods of education are deter- 
mined. 

If a test similar to that used for mental 
capacity in the schools could be devised to 
determine the degree of spiritual efficiency of 
the members of the church, it would be the 
means of large usefulness. Spiritual capacity 
and usefulness, of course, can never be meas- 
ured by any kind of a machine, however 
cleverly constructed, nor judged by any list of 
superficial questions. We have seen too many 
disastrous snap judgments formed on the basis 
of the church's meeting or failing to meet some 
arbitrary and mechanical test which seems so 
important to the one who makes it that all 
else is left out of consideration. We have 
grown exceedingly weary of the dismal 
prophet who tells us that the prayer meeting 
is the "barometer of the church," and bewails 
the approach of dark and stormy days when- 
ever the attendance (or the noise, perhaps) 
fails to register one hundred per cent. 

Yet as those who are urged to show them- 
selves approved workmen, the consideration 
of what would be some elements of a real test 



A TEST FOR DEFECTIVES 61 

of fundamental deficiency in the Master's 
service ought to be a vital one. It is not 
primarily a test of character which is pro- 
posed, or of sincerity or intent. We will 
make a large assumption and take those for 
granted. It would, rather, be along the lines 
of the Binet Test — one of Christian sense- 
development and nerve response. One vital test 
of deficiency in service for every member and 
every church would certainly be the question : 
How far can you see? It is easy enough to 
see the things that lie right in front of us in 
our routine work ; it is not so easy to see over 
the hill of the years and catch a vision of the 
value of unspectacular long-range work. But 
it is far more important. It is easy to see the 
value of getting Mr. Brown, the cashier of the 
First National Bank, into the church, but it 
is quite another thing to see the value of hold- 
ing and training the little freckle-faced, 
red-headed Jones boy, who does nothing in 
Sunday school but throw paper wads, to every- 
body's annoyance. The chances are that the 
latter is much more strategic. The financial 
results of a church supper are far more satisfy- 
ing than the deficit incurred by a girls' club, 
viewed from a one- or two-year standpoint, 



62 FARES, PLEASE! 

which is the one usually employed. Carlyle 
said of Macaulay that he had spectacles in- 
stead of eyes. Spectacles, seeing only the 
outward and obvious, will never serve for eyes 
in the work of the Kingdom. The long-range 
vision which plans for twenty years hence is 
necessary. "No one ought to be satisfied," 
says Dr. Cabot, "to test his work by any easier 
standards than these: First, am I seeing all 
the actual facts, the ever new and unique facts 
as they come before me? Second, am I trac- 
ing out, as far as I can, the full bearing, the 
true lesson of this movement or situation ?" 
It would be an immeasurable boon to the 
statesmanship of the church if these tests were 
to become part of its inner consciousness. The 
church without a definite sacrificial policy for 
its boys and girls has been well compared to 
a dog which is being shipped by express and 
has chewed up its tag. It is going somewhere, 
but no one knows just where. 

An agent of Tammany Hall in June, 1915, 
refused to take a lease on a piece of property 
desired for a new building for the organization 
because he could secure it for only two terms 
of ninety-nine years each ! It recalls some old 
words about the children of this world being 



A TEST FOR DEFECTIVES 63 

wiser in their generation than the children of 
light. How much more essential is long-range 
vision to the Christian statesman! 

Give me not scenes more charming; give me eyes 
To see the beauty that around me lies; 
To see the charm of souls, see angels shy 
Among the faces of the passers-by. 

How quick is your motor response? The 
lapse of time between the mental impression 
and its expression in muscular reaction is 
made of crucial importance in gauging the 
fineness of mental organization. It has the 
same cardinal place in measuring spiritual 
efficiency. It was a principle of Queen Eliza- 
beth's — to which we owe the result that 
American civilization is Anglo-Saxon instead 
of Latin — that discovery without possession 
was without avail. The knowledge of spiritual 
truth without real possession by life response 
is equally futile. The response of the defective 
is like the theological student to whom the 
call for missionary service came and who an- 
swered, "Lord, here am I ; send John." 

A lady was being congratulated on her son's 
making the football team at college, and was 
asked what position he played. "I don't 
know," she answered, "but I think he is one 



64 FAKES, PLEASE! 

of the drawbacks." It may have been true. 
Many a player, with all the assistance of a 
fully equipped uniform, is not really a half- 
back but only a drawback. And when our 
response to the truth is slow and indistinct, 
that is our real position. The church does not 
need guards so much as it needs tackles in 
its ground-gaining offense. "Acts may be for- 
given," says Stevenson, "but God himself can- 
not forgive the hanger -back." 



XII 
WHAT'S THE NEWS? 

"Will there be any newspapers in heaven, 
papa?" asked seven-years. 

Father was an editor and his reply was 
brief : "I hope not." 

No doubt the people who have been inter- 
viewed for the press very often will be unani- 
mous in the opinion that there could not be a 
newspaper in heaven because there will be no 
reporters there. It raises a suggestive ques- 
tion as to just what would be deemed worthy 
of chronicle in a daily record of the events of 
earth seen in the light of heaven's standards, 
where not the outward appearance but the 
final value was seen. It is not so extravagant 
a fancy either. For, surely, in that Eye which 
neithers slumbers nor sleeps and which notes 
even the sparrow's fall, all things are unerr- 
ingly noted as either trivial or great. 

Such a record would be so different from the 
morning paper which is served up with our 
breakfast that it would be hard to recognize 

65 



66 FARES, PLEASE! 

our world through its pages. On that much 
we could all agree. We place hourly depend- 
ence on the paper to keep us in touch with the 
world, and life in the modern world would be 
almost inconceivable without it. Yet we 
realize that in them we see through a glass 
darkly. The truth is only approximated. A 
parade of mourners for those lost in a factory 
fire was held in New York in April, 1911. The 
headlines in the different papers the next day 
ran thus: 60,000 parade— Globe ; 122,000 
parade in rain — World; Estimate of 200,000 
exceeded — Evening Sun; 300,000 in parade 
—Telegram; 50,000 walked— Sun; 80,000 
marched — Tribune ; 100,000 pass in pageant — 
Mail. "What is truth?" might well be a fair 
question ! 

Even in the most conservative papers, the 
seamy, feverish, and sensational aspects of life 
bulk out of their real proportion. A Euro- 
pean reading American journals might be for- 
given for concluding that we are degenerating, 
since the crimes, scandals, and divorces are 
served up with such embellishment. One 
needs to read papers like the Survey and. the 
reviews to keep his balance and learn the 
world's real constructive work. Stevenson's 



WHAT'S THE NEWS? 67 

complaint is well justified: "So long as an 
artist is on his head, is painting with a flute, 
or writes with an etching needle, or conducts 
an orchestra with a meatax, all is well, and 
plaudits shower along with the roses. But 
any plain man who tries to follow the unobtru- 
sive canons of his art is but a commonplace 
figure." 

The thought of what the relative importance 
of the day's happenings would be in heaven's 
eyes, leads us to two truths about news that 
should never be allowed to grow dim. 

1. The real news of any time is the working 
of forces that are making to-morrow. Had 
you asked a citizen of Rome in Nero's time, 
"What's the news?" he would have told you 
that the triumph in the Forum that day was 
the biggest thing in the world. Whereas, we 
know from the vantage point of to-day that 
the real news was that a little Christian prayer 
meeting was held down in the catacombs. 
That was the force that was making a new 
civilization. Beside it all the triumphs the 
Forum ever saw were about as important as 
the buzzing of a fly. An Englishman in the 
early part of the eighteenth century on being 
asked the same question would have told you 



68 FARES, PLEASE! 

something about Parliament. He did not 
dream that the greatest event of a half century 
was the fact that up there in the Epworth 
rectory the tired and overworked mother of a 
large family was teaching her children to pray. 
Yet it is only a matter of sober history that in 
the quiet and obscure rectory was being 
shaped the force that was not only to revitalize 
England but also to bless the whole world. It 
is in the light of such truth that we must open 
our eyes on to-day and realize that wherever 
any personal force for the blessing of the days 
to come* is being shaped, there is the real news 
as God sees it. 

2. Hence the street corner test is never the 
true test. The blatant noise which it makes 
on the street is no test of the importance of 
anything. A newspaper in heaven would have 
a page of trade reports, but it would not be 
filled with stock quotations and bank clear- 
ings. The giving of the Widow's Mite would 
be worthy of an extra edition, for it was the 
largest financial transaction that ever took 
place on the planet in its influence. Here is 
a man who in the face of great temptation is 
holding on to. his honor and keeping faith with 
his noblest self. That is the biggest thing in 



WHAT'S THE NEWS? 69 

the trade reports, as God views them. Here 
is an invalid blessing her little circle with 
unfailing patience and cheer. That is real 
news. Here is a woman going down to the 
slums of the city, putting herself into the lives 
of the unprivileged. Nothing in the city out- 
ranks the record of her day. 

The man who truly sees is never overawed 
by mere noise. The greatest actions are done 
in small struggles. There are noble and mys- 
terious triumphs which no eye sees save God's, 
no renown rewards, and no flare of trumpets 
salutes. But they are entered in his Book of 
Remembrance. 



XIII 
THEEE CHAIKS 

In his description of the cabin in which he 
spent those memorable days on Walden Pond, 
Thoreau says that his sitting room contained 
three chairs — one for solitude, two for friend- 
ship, and three for crowds. There can be no 
doubt that the favorite one with Thoreau was 
the single chair that represented solitude, but 
he was wise enough to realize that even for 
one like himself, who could make such splen- 
did use of solitude, the isolated life is incom- 
plete. 

Thoreau's three chairs well represented to 
him the furnishing of the ideal living room. 
This complete furnishing is by no means so 
common as we might imagine. Everyone 
moves in a superficial way, at least, in the 
three concentric circles of himself, his friends, 
and the world. But the concentration in one 
to the virtual exclusion of the others is far 
from rare. Perhaps the person represented by 
the three chairs is the most common — the man 

70 



THREE CHAIRS 71 

who lives in the crowd with its changing 
scenes and outward interests, but who, if he 
is thrown on his own resources for a week, is 
unable to rub one thought against another for 
his own entertainment, and suffers terrible 
pangs of ennui. At the other extreme there 
are the souls which, whether very much like 
stars or not, dwell apart, and neither ask much 
from society nor give much to it. 

One chair. It is a poorly furnished house 
that does not have its chair for solitude. "We 
are too busy, too encumbered, too much occu- 
pied." It is Amiel who is speaking. "In in- 
action which is meditative and attentive the 
wrinkles of the soul are smoothed away. 
Reverie, like the rain of night, restores color 
and force to the thoughts which have been 
blanched and wearied by the heat of the day." 
A celebrated philosopher while out making 
visits one afternoon turned in at his own door 
to pay a call without realizing that he lived 
there himself. There is no better place at 
which to pay a call, for we come to a sorry 
pass indeed when we have a long list of ac- 
quaintances, but know as little of our inner 
selves as of Afghanistan. To pay a visit to 
ourselves and learn what manner of men we 



72 FARES, PLEASE! 

are is an indispensable condition of growth, 
mental as well as spiritual. It is a very differ- 
ent thing from a weakening indulgence in 
sentimental introspection, with the sad results 
of which we are all too familiar. Walt Whit- 
man voiced a sturdy and very healthy protest 
against this kind of morbid self -questioning : 
"It is as though we should sit down to a meal 
and ask, 'Why do I eat? Why does this taste 
good?' or on a summer day, 'Why do I feel so 
good in the glory of the sun?' Why? Why? 
Why? Everlastingly picking life to pieces in- 
stead of living." Avoiding this extreme, how- 
ever, there is still the other, that of keeping 
our minds so hospitable to outward things that 
we have never courage to fathom the rush of 
outside interests and find out the real rock 
bottom of our own beings. To let our interest 
wander in every direction comes to the same 
thing as having no interest in anything. The 
only way in which we profit by our experiences 
is in selecting those we choose to possess and in 
the chair of solitude to study, weigh, and make 
them our own. Rabbi Hillel used to dismiss 
his classes saying, "You may go now; I have 
a guest to entertain." The "guest" was his 
own soul. 



THREE CHAIRS 73 

Character needs solitude. We can never 
estimate the part played in the life of Lincoln 
by the fact that his early years were set amid 
the great brooding places of the earth, the 
silences of the hills and forest. With space 
for contemplation and reverie, he thought 
things through. John R. Mott has finely put 
the whole plea for meditation and prayer — 
"The streams that turn the machinery of the 
world, take their rise in solitary places." 

Two chairs for Friendship. Is it true that 
close and intimate friendships are going out 
of fashion, just like family carriages, hoop- 
skirts, and other quaint customs of departed 
days? If it is, we are paying a heavy price 
for the inventions which have supplanted 
them. There is no doubt that the better means 
of communication, the endless multiplication of 
books, and the higher gearing of speed in the 
present days, have made us less willing to give 
up the time the formation and growth of an 
intimate friendship requires. There are other 
costs in frankness and humility. But the 
aspect of life represented by two chairs is one 
of the richest and as we look over the story 
of the most fruitful lives we find again and 
again the central turning point to have been 



74 FARES, PLEASE! 

the formation of some fine friendship of last- 
ing inspiration. 

Three Chairs for Crowds. Not large crowds 
for most of us. Only a few ever live to count 
their influence in multitudes. But for all of 
us there is the danger of a premature satisfac- 
tion in a few choice fellowships and withdraw- 
ing ourselves from the larger circle of those 
in whose lives we could fill some real want, 
but who are less personally attractive. That 
ever-present remembrance in the mind of 
Jesus deserves a place with all : "Other sheep 
have I which are not of this fold." One of the 
most instructive things in his life was the 
intense degree with which he loved the close 
fellowship of congenial friends, the rare home 
at Bethany, and the reenforcement of that 
inner circle of Peter, James, and John. Yet 
he withdrew so rarely with these. They never 
obscured his eyes to that farther vision of the 
fields white unto harvest, the harassed multi- 
tudes of sheep without a shepherd. 



XIV 
HOW MUCH ARE YOU WORTH? 

When Li Hung Chang was visiting America 
a number of years ago he had a very discon- 
certing way of asking people he met, with 
Oriental blandness, "How much are you 
worth V 9 Occasionally he followed it with one 
very much more embarrassing in certain quar- 
ters : "How did you get it?" 

It is not a very usual question, nor perhaps 
a polite one, but it is a fair one, and we cannot 
hope to permanently avoid it. How much are 
you worth? 

The chemist has a ready answer. Suppos- 
ing you weigh about one hundred and fifty 
pounds, he can tell you to a cent your material 
value. A French chemist has figured you out 
exactly. You are worth about eight dollars! 
There are in your body enough by-products to 
make an ordinary iron nail, enough salt to fill 
an ordinary salt cellar, enough sugar to fill 
a small sugar bowl, enough lime to whitewash 
a chicken coop, enough phosphorus to make a 
dozen matches, enough magnesia for one dose. 

75 



76 FARES, PLEASE! 

The albumenoids could be used by a tricky 
baker to replace the whites of a hundred eggs, 
and there would be fat enough to fill a ten- 
pound pot. Perhaps if you weigh two hundred 
pounds you are worth a little more. You are 
worth about nine dollars and fifty cents. But 
you will say, "I object to having my value 
stated in terms of physical by-products." Very 
well. Step on another scale. 

The business man has a ready answer. The 
average cost of the upbringing of a child from 
birth to the age of twenty is |4,150 and its 
average commercial value at that time is 
$4,000. These figures are based on the net earn- 
ing capacity of the average citizen for all the 
gainful occupations in California, capitalized 
at six per cent interest. As an investment it is 
estimated that by the age of thirty years the 
average man is worth $16,000 — $4,000 value, 
plus $12,000 gross earnings, and has cost $10,- 
150 to maintain, or a net gain of $5,850 in 
thirty years. The same figure, $5,000, is about 
what is awarded by the court when a suit for 
damages is brought against a railroad for the 
accidental death of an adult man. 

Now, $5,000 is a good deal more than eight 
or nine-fifty, but it is not much more satis- 



HOW MUCH ARE YOU WORTH? 77 

factory. Few of us will be content to have 
ourselves measured by the same measure used 
for corn and coal. Some one will say, "You 
can't measure value without brains. It is 
mental capacity which determines values." So 
The educator has his answer. It is not so 
easy to compute by rough processes, but it has 
alluring suggestions. The artist Millet buys 
some canvas and a few paints for sixty cents, 
and paints the "Angelus," which sells for 
$105,000. Results : raw material, sixty cents ; 
value of brains, $104,999.40. Pig iron is worth 
$20 a ton; made into horse shoes, $90; knife 
blades, $200 ; watch springs, $1,000. Raw ma- 
terial worth, $20; brains, $980. This looks 
more like sense— a man is worth what he can 
do. But to rest value on mental capacity alone 
is poor calculation. The warden of Sing Sing 
Prison, in New York, said to a visitor whom 
he was showing through the prison, "We have 
here a first-class college faculty. There is 
not a college subject which could not be well 
taught by some one of the prisoners." Here 
was a wealth of mental ability, yet so far from 
being of value to society, its possessors were 
so much of a detriment that they had to be 
restrained by iron gratings. 



78 FARES, PLEASE! 

The directing force is the final arbiter of a 
man's worth, and the only valid one. In all 
these calculations we have only come up by 
an unfrequented path to the standards of 
Jesus. A man's worth can never be measured 
in physical materials or dollars or brains in 
themselves, but in two terms only — character 
and service. 

We cannot measure temperature by the 
pound or men by things. Man is a spirit 
created capable of a divine fellowship, and the 
currency of the Kingdom to which he belongs 
and in which his final value is reckoned is in 
purposes and ideals. It is computed by the 
degree to which we live up to the injunction 
of Burns, 

Where'er you feel your honor grip 
Let that aye be your border. 

It is reckoned by the unattained to which we 
reach. 

All I aspired to be and was not 
Comforts me. That was I worth to God. 

An Indian devotee, who added a large iron 
ring to his body every year, as a penance, 
finally weighed so much that the railroads 
refused to accept him as a passenger and 



HOW MUCH ARE YOU WORTH ? 79 

shipped hira as freight. There are a great 
many people, who if they were weighed by 
what they carry inside of them in the way of 
character, would go forward as freight. 

Service is the other test. Jesus's parable 
of the Last Judgment states the truth that 
worth is to be computed wholly in terms of 
expenditure. In the world of commerce we 
compute wealth in surplus and saving. In the 
Kingdom of God it is figured in things spent — 
the amount of concrete helpfulness and 
genuine love we have put into the lives of our 
brothers. 



XV 

THE SURPRISE OF LIFE 

A literary critic has told us that there are 
only seven original stories in the world and 
that all others are variations of these seven 
plots. One of the oldest and most universal 
of these seven stories is that of the ugly duck- 
ling, the despised creature of the barnyard, 
which surprised all the other fowls and itself 
most of all by turning into the beautiful swan. 
Cinderella, the delight of all young hearts, is 
another form of the same tale. It appears in 
the romantic career of Joseph. It is the tale 
of the rejected stone which becomes the head 
of the corner. In a very lofty and reverent 
sense, it is the story of Him who was despised 
and rejected of men, but unto whom every 
knee shall bow and every tongue confess. 

We cherish the tale in all forms, because it 
does for us a very large service. It pictures 
life in terms of its surprises. It witnesses to 
the fact that however humdrum and routine 
we may allow it to appear, life can never be 
reduced to exact formulas. No matter how 

80 



THE SURPRISE OF LIFE 81 

scientifically we may think and speak of causes 
and consequences, we make but a poor muddle 
of our calculations unless we continually 
allow for a variable "x" — the surprising fact 
that the race is not always to the swift nor 
the battle to the strong. All who have lived 
long and who have given any thoughtful 
glance back, would agree that one of the 
strangest features of their lives has been in 
the unexpected part played by its unnoticed 
fragments and lightly esteemed remainders. 
Professor Moore, of Columbia University, 
spent an honored life as a teacher of lan- 
guages, doing work of high scholarly value. 
One afternoon, for the amusement of some 
children, he wrote some playful little verses 
beginning, " 'Twas the night before Christmas, 
and all through the house." All of his learned 
linguistic works have been forgotten, even 
by scholars; but the little verses have put on 
the bloom of immortality. It is only a vivid 
illustration of the truth that the thing most 
worth remembrance may be what is thought of 
least. Real romance is preserved in every life 
by the constant possibility of surprise. And 
it works mightily for our encouragement in 
service. 



82 FARES, PLEASE! 

Unpretentious things have a surprising way 
of counting for more than our most elaborate 
efforts. How much more is our happiness 
governed by simple pleasures, simple comforts, 
and above all, simple goodness, than by our 
abilities or our cleverness ! Men of the finest 
native talents are humbled again and again by 
seeing the much greater accomplishment of 
men far their inferiors in ingenuity and elo- 
quence. Carlyle observes, "How much inferior 
for seeing with is your brightest train of fire- 
works to the humblest farthing candle!" It 
has been computed that it would take thirty- 
seven flashes of lightning to keep a common 
incandescent lamp burning for one hour. The 
surprise of life often comes in the greater 
power there is in the steady glow of faithful- 
ness and kindness than in the flashes of talent 
and genius. There was irony in the remark 
made of a certain minister, that the best pas- 
sage in his sermon was the passage from the 
pulpit to the vestry. But the finest passage 
of even the most eloquent utterance 's that 
which carries the truth out into the intimacies 
of daily intercourse. 

Unintended things often become the head of 
the corner. Miss Sullivan, the wonderful 



THE SURPRISE OP LIFE 83 

teacher of Helen Keller, records this discovery 
in a letter written three weeks after beginning 
her deaf and blind pupil's education: "I am 
Helen's nurse as well as teacher. I like to 
have her depend on me for everything, and I 
find it easier to teach her things at odd mo- 
ments than at set times." It is a wise dis- 
covery worthy the remembrance of any 
teacher. We are apt to consider as our life- 
work the things done at set times and then 
stumble on to the strange fact that the "odd 
moments" have produced as much or more in 
fruitful results. Life's best things frequently 
come from its interruptions. The very act of 
setting about things in a formal way, as 
though to say, "Here now, I am going to 
teach you something," or "I am going to do 
you good," often serves to close the mind we 
wish to reach; while the unheralded word 
thrown off in the course of the day's work, 
and hence real and genuine, carries conviction. 
Incidental things are a never-ending sur- 
prise. We are frequently amazed at the small- 
ness and apparent triviality of the things 
which people remember about us. We do our 
work, or make our speeches, and are discon- 
certed to find that we are not recalled by our 



84 FARES, PLEASE! 

main performances or public efforts at all. A 
lady in a Connecticut village told her pastor 
that all she remembered of a minister who 
preached there fifty years before, and who 
since rendered distinguished service as a 
bishop of the Methodist Church, South, was 
that two little beads of perspiration always 
formed on his brow when he preached. Her 
pastor replied that he would be willing to 
have every sermon of his forgotten, if the im- 
pression of earnestness and sincerity were 
strong enough to span half a century. We 
work in life's morning for its certainties ; but 
at evening we shall doubtless rejoice most in 
its surprises. 



XVI 

SAFETY FIRST? 

In Mr. St. John G. Ervine's book of 
sketches, Eight O'clock and Other Studies, 
there is an unforgetable character portrait 
of a Mr. Timms, a clerk in a large London 
office. The life of Mr. Timms revolved con- 
tinually around the thought: Supposing that 
one day he should be unable to work, what 
should become of him? He would awaken at 
night, crying out in fear because of some 
horrible dream in which he saw himself dis- 
missed from the service of his employers for 
one reason or another. The same terror was 
his evil genius by day. So as the years passed, 
the despotism of this fear took heavy toll of 
the best possibilities of his life. Something 
inside of him would urge the quest of adven- 
tures. "Do something to show that you are 
alive," it would say, and the fear of endanger- 
ing his position by some time yielding to one 
of these moods added another to his many 
terrors. He thought of marriage, and "the 

85 



86 FAKES, PLEASE! 

thing inside" kept saying, "Risk it, man, risk 
it!" But the thought of the possibility of 
getting sick and out of employment, with a 
wife and perhaps a family to support, drove 
him back to the dreariness of his dingy bed- 
sitting room. Finally the inevitable comes; 
he loses his position and his savings rapidly 
dwindle. Sickness overtakes him and the 
doctor's verdict is that he has only a short 
time to live. The doctor is amazed at the 
calm which the announcement brings. "Thank 
God," said Mr. Timms to himself, "I am safe 
now." In three months he was dead. 

It is a graphic and pathetic picture of the 
frightful cost of the worship of safety. 

The wide popularity of the industrial 
slogan "Safety First" has been of immense 
service in reducing the number of preventable 
accidents, and has taken on the proportions 
of a national movement. In which we all re- 
joice. But this ideal, so eminently fitting for 
railroad and shop operation, is often trans- 
ferred and set up as an ideal in a field where 
it can work only havoc — the world of moral 
action. 

Safety First is the poorest motto which 
could possibly be taken for life. We may well 



SAFETY FIRST? 87 

ask in these days of slaughter, "Can any good 
come out of Nietzsche?" But there is a fine 
word in his advice, "Live dangerously." He 
explains it as meaning, "I will try something 
I have not tried before; I will walk without 
leading strings; I will work in a fresh 
medium." In the struggle between the 
temptation to prefer ease and softness, 
quietude and safety, to risk, striving, daring, 
and adventure, the prize of getting the most 
out of life as well as keeping truest to the pur- 
poses of God belongs on the side of the daring. 
Shall my life be ruled by small maxims or 
by large principles? This is the previous 
question every one must answer. The cult of 
the twin gods of Thrift and Prudence has 
always been a numerous one. Its most in- 
spired scripture is, "A bird in the hand is 
worth two in the bush." It loves "practical, 
hard-headed common sense." It delights in 
rule of thumb maxims for keeping the eye on 
the "main chance." It is safe and sane. But 
it is so hopelessly sane that it overreaches its 
mark, and a calculating prudence has de- 
stroyed more souls than prodigal vice. "Where 
ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise," is 
sometimes nobly true, for, as Stevenson points 



88 FARES, PLEASE! 

out, "To be overwise is to ossify; and the 
scruple-monger ends by standing stock still. 
Who, if he were wisely considerate of things 
at large, would ever embark on any work much 
more considerable than a penny postcard?" 
Can any risk in life be more hazardous than 
that of spending it making tame and dull little 
"half-penny postcards," when it might be made 
a living epistle of noble exploits? 

Take friendship, for instance. How shall 
we deal with the alternate courses of risk and 
safety and risk there? The achievement of a 
fine friendship is one of the most worthful 
undertakings of life. But every true friend- 
ship is a risk. It lays our lives open to costly 
liabilities. So Prudence whispers in our ears : 
"Be not friendly overmuch. Be pleasant, 
cordial; cultivate the acquaintance of people 
who 'count.' But be careful. Don't allow 
your heart-strings to get such a firm half -hitch 
around another person that you can't let go 
while you are on the safe side of trouble. If 
you get in too deep, it is liable to cost you 
discomfort and money, and perhaps hurt your 
reputation." This is the siren voice which 
many follow to the barren rocks of selfishness. 
So they are safe — they avoid the risks, and 



SAFETY FIRST? 89 

miss the finest joy life has to offer — the gener- 
ous and uncalculating thrill of a loving heart. 
Then they wonder, very often, why life grows 
flat and stale. So by staying indoors we can 
avoid the risk of catching cold; but we will 
also miss the glory of the sunrise, the swing of 
the cloud in the midsummer sky, the subtile 
witchery of the twilight — in a word, life. 

The service of Christ is a large risk. When 
anyone gives himself sincerely to a real bit of 
work in the church or Kingdom, he verily 
takes up a cross. It will surely cost money 
and toil. The chances are it will also mean 
misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and 
friction. Seeing only what is near, men side- 
step the task. On the altar of Safety, the 
privilege of being a colaborer with God is 
ruthlessly sacrificed. Is it worth it? In 
every field — in politics, in social service — 
the same interplay of risk and safety is seen. 
In every one is the brave entry made in the 
journal of the first minister in New England 
on the voyage across the Atlantic, eternally 
true — "Those that love their owne chimney 
corner and dare not fare beyond their owne 
towne's end, shall never have the honor to see 
the wonderful workes of God." 



XVII 

WHAT DO YOU EXPECT YOUR CHURCH 
TO DO FOR YOU? 

This question makes a large assumption 
which is not always justified by any means. 
Many expect nothing of their church. They 
bring to it no earnest expectation of its doing 
anything definite, and they get just about 
what they bring — nothing. Tennyson's 
"Northern Farmer" had a blurred experience 
at church which is a common one : 

An' I never knowed what lie meaned, but I thowt he 'ad 

summat to say, 
An' I thowt he said whot he owt to 'a said, an' I coom'd 

awaay. 

It is significant that on several occasions when 
Jesus did any works of healing he deemed it 
important to have a clear answer to the ques- 
tion, "What wilt thou have me to do?" The 
extent and clearness of expectation often 
determines the extent and concreteness of 
benefit. 

There are some things which we have no 

90 



WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? 91 

right to expect our church to do for us. It 
cannot save us. This is an obvious truth, but 
we should not forget that it has not always 
been so, nor is it to-day to multitudes of Chris- 
tians. With a great price has this freedom 
been obtained for us. Nor can the church 
automatically improve us. This is not so 
clearly held in mind. It is easy to slip into 
the unconscious feeling that church-going 
works some kind of an automatic charm. We 
live in an age when so much is done for us 
by clever mechanical contrivances. Edison 
says the future is to be an age of buttons — 
simply press on the right button and dismiss 
the matter from your mind. We can cook 
breakfast in bed to music from the automatic 
piano. We do our housework with vacuum 
cleaners and electric irons, while the fireless 
cooker is getting dinner. All of which in- 
creases the temptation to think of spiritual 
things in automatic terms. 

If we will swiftly glance at what their con- 
tact with Jesus brought to three widely differ- 
ent men, we will discover three things which 
are permanent elements of what we ought to 
expect of our church. 

The first is the Blind Man. His answer to 



92 FARES, PLEASE! 

Jesus's question, "What wilt thou have me to 
do?" was a definite one — "Lord, that I may 
receive my sight." We have a right to expect 
vision. There was organized a few years ago 
among people aroused by the miseries of pre- 
ventable blindness, a society with a name as 
noble as its purpose — "The Society for the 
Conservation of Vision." That is just what 
the Christian Church is. It exists to wipe 
out the misery caused by preventable moral 
and spiritual blindness, and more particu- 
larly, to prevent it. If the wires are the sensi- 
tive nerves of a city, the parks its lungs, and 
the railroads its gigantic arms, its churches 
are its eyes, its watchtowers and hills of 
vision, which pierce through the smoke and 
grime and the fog of bewilderment to the 
Eternal. As a workman complained recently, 
"We work all day to make money and half 
the night to spend it; what we need is some 
one to tell us what it is all about." 

But "vision" is an abstract and rather 
vague word. Schools, homes, and political 
institutions give vision. Expectation must be 
focused more closely. Three Greeks went to 
church one day in Jerusalem with a definite 
expectation which was met — "Sir, we would 



WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? 93 

see Jesus." That is still the supreme thing 
our church should do for us. When we get a 
real vision of Him who above all others saw 
life steadily and saw it whole, we are able to 
take up its tangled threads and weave anew. 

The second man is Peter. His contact with 
Jesus evoked a strange cry — "Depart from me, 
for I am a sinful man." That same contact 
should bring to us continually rebuke. We 
do not like rebuke. It is much more pleasant 
to hear smooth sayings. It is a common 
remark to hear, "I go to church to be com- 
forted." And a right thing. But if we are 
always comforted at church, if we always 
enjoy the sermon, something is radically 
wrong. The sword of Christ which would 
destroy our superficial peace and shallow con- 
tent has never left the scabbard. It was a fine 
compliment that Louis XIV paid to Massil- 
lon: "I have heard several great orators and 
have been much pleased with them; as for 
every time I hear you, I am much displeased 
with myself." Before Christ can touch the 
deepest level in man the man must be made 
thoroughly uncomfortable and discontented. 
When we cease measuring ourselves by the 
petty standards of our neighbors or our own 



94 FARES, PLEASE! 

mean achievements, and really see Jesus, we 
feel the keen edge of a spiritual hunger. 

The third man is Matthew. Contact with 
Christ for him meant inspiration and immedi- 
ate action. "He arose and followed him." If 
we come ready to receive and cherish those 
high words of Jesus — his great imperatives, 
"Come," "Be," "Do," "Go"— we shall never 
find him to fail us. He brings the freshness of 
the heroic. Men are won not by premises or 
even by conclusions. They respond to the 
trumpet tones. A young soldier on a hospital 
cot pleaded with the doctor, "O, don't say I'm 
not fit for duty. It's only a touch of fever, and 
the sound of the bugle will make me well." 
The church which speaks the word of her Mas- 
ter always brings the medicine of the bugle. 



XVIII 

WHAT DOES YOUR CHURCH EXPECT 

OF YOU? 

It is a sad but common mistake to imagine 
that we ever add to the permanent attractive- 
ness of the church by minimizing or slurring 
over its costly demands and expectations. It 
is true, of course, that a church should be the 
most attractive place in any community. All 
that can be brought to it of fellowship, music, 
and inspiration, should be there as the fine 
gold of the sanctuary, adorning the doctrine 
of God. But it is a great blunder to think we 
ever make the church attractive by hiding the 
truth that at its center is not a flower garden 
but a cross. No one ever desired so passion- 
ately to win adherents as did Jesus, and yet 
he seemed to fear nothing so much as that 
people would get the impression that he was 
asking them to go on a picnic, a sort of rollick- 
ing pleasure trip down to Jerusalem, where 
the great rewards would be distributed. He 
could do more with twelve men who joined 

95 



96 FARES, PLEASE! 

him with a real sense of his conditions than 
with five thousand who would make him King 
because they had enjoyed a free dinner. There 
is keen truth in the satire of Sam Jones that 
the saying of Jesus, "If any man will come 
after me, let him deny himself, and take up 
his cross and follow me," is frequently inter- 
preted as though it meant, "If any man will 
come after me, let him enjoy himself, and take 
up his ice-cream freezer and follow me." 

Your church expects you to believe in it. 
Which is a very different thing from patroniz- 
ing it, or giving it your cordial good wishes, 
or even filling up your Duplex envelope every 
Sunday. It means to believe that it has a 
mission in nourishing men's lives that nothing 
else can possibly replace. It expects you to 
believe in it as the architect believes in the 
steel frame of his skyscraper, or the engineer 
believes in the girders of his bridge ; or, to take 
a far more suitable figure, as the farmer be- 
lieves in rain. He may get along without 
paint on his barns; he may manage without 
a self-binder or a steam plow ; but he does need 
commerce with the sky in the form of rain. So 
the conviction that the soul of man needs the 
life of God must be equally regnant. 



WHAT DOES CHURCH EXPECT? 97 

Religion's all or nothing; it's no mere smile 

Of contentment, sigh of aspiration, sir, 

No quality of the finely tempered clay 

Like its whiteness or its lightness; rather stuff 

Of the very stuff; life of life, and self of self. 



It is true that the groves were God's first 
temples and that man can worship his Maker 
anywhere. But it is also true that the man 
who will worship everywhere is the man who 
has learned to worship somewhere. "Look out 
for that man," some one said of young Robes- 
pierre. "He's dangerous. He believes what 
he says." Your church expects "dangerous" 
believers. 

It expects you to prove it. That is not to 
write a book of apologetics. The fundamental 
demand of the church on each one of us is not 
this detailed piece of service or that, however 
important it may be, but to prove its authority 
by our exposition of the kind of life it can 
create. We are expected to be living proofs 
of the ability of the gospel through the church 
to create character. We frequently hear 
people speak of doing church work and find 
that they refer to baking pies and sewing 
quilts, work that is not distinctly religious at 
all. "Men will wrangle for religion, work for 



98 FARES, PLEASE! 

it, write for it, fight for it, die for it, do every- 
thing but live for it." The primary religious 
work is to live in the power of the Christian 
evangel. 

Your church expects you to project it. Arch- 
bishop Whately was still the logician when 
he said, "Either give up your religion or 
propagate it." There is no middle course. 
The last paragraph of every effective sermon 
must always be made up of actions on the part 
of the congregation. Our church has a right 
to expect its impulse to travel down to our 
feet and make of us "souls in motion." In 
1864, when Lee's army had entered Pennsyl- 
vania, a citizen of Philadelphia telegraphed 
General Halleck at Washington to know if he 
could be of any service in that vicinity. He 
received this grim reply : "We have five times 
as many generals as we want, but we are 
greatly in need of privates. Any one volun- 
teering in that capacity will be thankfully re- 
ceived." 

"Greatly in need of privates!" Plenty of 
volunteers for the seats of the mighty, but the 
earnest expectation of the church waiteth for 
the appearance of its "private projectors." 



XIX 

THE HIGHEST HEREDITY 

The phrase belongs to that maker of splen- 
did phrases, David Starr Jordan. The most 
determining factor in every man's inheritance 
is not that which he gets from his grandfather 
but what he gets from himself. Every man is 
his own most important ancestor. 

The nineteenth century gave us two dra- 
matic literary pictures of heredity in striking 
contrast. One of them was Ibsen's Ghosts. 
It is a play full of characteristic Scandinavian 
gloom, showing the progress to tragic climaxes 
of a group of people under the relentless auto- 
matic control of the spent passions of their 
ancestors. It is full of a morbid fatalism, 
depicting a world where men move under the 
hopeless control of a dead hand. Its philoso- 
phy chains up human freedom in the meshes 
of an iron necessity more binding than the 
most rigid kind of foreordination ever con- 
ceived. 

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley pictures a very 

99 



100 FARES, PLEASE! 

different kind of force, still terrible, still un- 
escapable, but with a very different kind of 
source. Her Frankenstein tells the story of 
a student who constructed out of the frag- 
ments of bodies picked from churchyards and 
dissecting rooms a human form without a soul. 
The monster had muscular strength, animal 
passions, and an active life, but no "breath of 
divinity." It longed for animal love and sym- 
pathy but was shunned by all. For a time it 
followed obediently the dictates of its master, 
but gradually got away from his control, till 
finally, so far from being his servant, it be- 
comes his ruler. It was most powerful for 
evil, and being fully conscious of its own de- 
fects and deformities, sought with persistency 
to inflict retribution on the young student who 
had called it into being. 

Mrs. Shelley did not write Frankenstein 
primarily as an allegory but as a wild and 
powerful romance. It is all the more effective 
as a work of art in that it draws no lessons. 
The tragic movement of the tale is a living 
representation of the way a man's days and 
years gradually build up within a force of 
character whose movements he finally does not 
direct but obey. Christ's last words to Peter, 



THE HIGHEST HEREDITY 101 

as recorded by John, have a startling, though 
wholly unintended application to the realm of 
character-building through habit formation: 
"When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself 
and walkedst whither thou wouldest ; but when 
thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy 
hands and another shall gird thee and carry 
thee whither thou wouldest not." The "other" 
who finally girds and carries us is the un- 
conscious force which our yesterdays have 
created and placed on the throne. 

,The heredity we receive from others is never 
to be lightly regarded. The twentieth century 
is young, barely entered on its adolescence, yet 
it has already added distinctly to our knowl- 
edge and appreciation of the importance and 
laws of heredity. The whole new science of 
eugenics has been marked out and pretty well 
staked off in fifteen years. The future will 
give not less but more importance to the 
problems of heredity than ever before. But 
no possible advance in our knowledge of an- 
cestral heredity will ever subtract from the 
truth that it is from ourselves that we receive 
the most determining inheritance. The classic 
pictures of "The Three Fates," blindly spin- 
ning and cutting the thread of life, is an 



102 FARES, PLEASE! 

anachronism. We handle the shears for our- 
selves. The man of forty is under the "grip 
of a dead hand," but it is not so much that 
of his father as that of the boy of fifteen or 
twenty that he used to be. It is "the vanished 
yesterdays" which are the tyrants of to-mor- 
row. Ruskin declares, with a fine appre- 
ciation of this truth, that he had rather 
hear people speak of thoughtless old age, than 
indulgently excuse "the thoughtlessness of 
youth." "Youth thoughtless, when the career 
of all his days depends on the chances or 
passions of an hour or the opportunities of 
a moment! A youth thoughtless, when his 
every act is as a torch to the laid train of 
future conduct, and every imagination a foun- 
tain of life and death! Be thoughtless in 
future years rather than now, though, indeed, 
there is only one place where a man may be 
nobly thoughtless — his deathbed." 

There is only one real ghost who will ever 
haunt us. It is the vision of the man we might 
have been. In our brightest success and most 
abject failure he will be there, with a sad and 
wistful glance. The action of to-day, so appar- 
ently insignificant in itself, is determining 
whether we will leave to the man we will be 



THE HIGHEST HEREDITY 103 

to-morrow the fine inheritance of a mind un- 
spoiled by dissipation, trained to think and 
act, or whether we will throw away his inherit- 
ance before he has had a chance to touch it. 

"The highest heredity" is, at bottom, a great 
message of hope. To think that the limits of 
possibility are finally set at birth makes for 
inertia, irresponsibility, and despair. But to 
know that to-day we are creating our own 
to-morrow is a sobering and ennobling inspira- 
tion. 

One ship goes east, another west, 
By the selfsame winds that blow; 

'Tis the set of the sail, and not the gale, 
That determines the way they go. 

Never should this subject be left, however, 
without the remembrance that in addition to 
being the heirs of all the ages and of ourselves, 
we are "joint heirs with Jesus Christ." We 
are not left to work out our own salvation as a 
lonely tour- de- force, for it is God which 
worketh in us to will and to do of his good 
pleasure. 



XX 

CARRIED OVER FROM CHILDHOOD- 
LIABILITIES 

The glory of Christianity lies in the things 
it carries over from childhood. The fellow- 
ship of real Christians who have entered the 
Kingdom as little children and have kept those 
traits is the most youthful place in the world, 
as it is certainly the most glorious. 

But not all the remainders of childhood are 
on the credit side. Some are distinct liabili- 
ties, over which a watchful eye must be kept. 
In the church we are sure to find some of the 
qualities of childhood, which, above all things 
else, called forth Jesus's most enthusiastic 
praise. In the church as well, however, we 
are unfortunately apt to find some things 
carried over from childhood which are large 
subtractions from its possible power. Three 
phrases, which are a part of the memory of 
everyone, perhaps represent better than any- 
thing else some attitudes which are responsible 
for big loss. 

104 



CARRIED OVER LIABILITIES 105 

1. "Now I lay me down to sleep." Pity the 
man to whom these unforgetable words do 
not embody the most sacred memories of life ! 
They are universally freighted with the most 
tender associations, and it would be a ruth- 
less hand which should seek to pluck them 
out of their place. But aside from their tender 
memories, these childhood words may well 
stand for a soporific attitude and intent all 
too common in the life of the church. It is all 
too common for men to leave behind that alert 
and vigilant wakefulness which characterizes 
them in their business life — the qui vive so 
necessary there — when they enter the worship 
and service of the church, and instead of sum- 
moning all their faculties together, they lay 
themselves down to slumber on a child's crib. 
Too many of our prayers begin, "Now I lay 
me down to sleep." A man's-size prayer runs 
more like this : 

Now I get me up to wake, 

I pray the Lord my soul to shake. 

"Why," exclaims Sydney Smith, "should we 
call in paralysis to the aid of piety?" A young 
minister from the West coming to a small New 
England parish, noticed on his first Sunday 



106 FARES, PLEASE! 

that instead of the bell being rung in the man- 
ner to which he had been accustomed, it was 
tolled as for a funeral. He wondered who was 
dead, and at church time he found out. They 
were all dead. The deacons crept up the aisles 
like polar bears. The singing was what one 
would expect from Mrs. Jarley's wax works. 
The Sunday school was a fine demonstration 
of somnambulism. Very often the grand old 
words of the hymn bring to us quite a different 
sense than the one intended : 

On the Rock of Ages founded, 
What can shake thy sure repose? 

There is a provision in the Mosaic law 
against offering to the Lord a deformed ram 
or a sick ewe. Shall we offer to him any bet- 
ter, our hours of drowsiness, and reserve the 
wide-awake ones for the Board of Trade? By 
all means remember the evening prayer of 
childhood, but keep even a little clearer the 
ringing words of Isaiah, "Awake ! Awake ! O 
Zion! Put on thy strength! Shake thyself 
from the dust!" 

2. "You in your little corner and I in mine/' 
The words suggest the little reed organ in the 
primary room and the eager chorus of youthful 



CARRIED OYER LIABILITIES 107 

voices. Happy the church to which they sug- 
gest nothing else ! Sometimes they inevitably 
suggest something by no means so inspiring — 
a lack of real cooperation between members 
and societies, so that whatever prosecution of 
the work there is is a case of you in your 
"little corner and I in mine." It may be a case 
of too many Caesars who care more about being 
first in the little Alpine village of some par- 
ticular branch of work than second or third in 
the larger Rome. It may be simply the lack 
of a common vision which results in the differ- 
ent organizations of the church moving like 
a group of camp followers, instead of march- 
ing with the orderly swing of an army. With- 
out the thought of the larger whole they fre- 
quently duplicate, compete, and tread on one 
another's toes and even work at cross pur- 
poses. The result is a sad loss of energy and 
momentum. One of Kipling's finest stories 
is that of "the ship that found herself." In 
it he puts what is his one great message — the 
victory of discipline and organization over 
individualism and anarchy. The ship is mak- 
ing her first voyage and the different parts 
assert themselves in clamorous voices, each 
claiming its right to pull its own way and 



108 FARES, PLEASE! 

complaining of the other parts. Finally a new 
voice speaks, which none of the parts recog- 
nize. It is the voice of the ship herself, the 
larger whole to which the parts belong. As 
they listen to that voice and own its authority 
harmony comes out of the confusion and the 
ship "finds herself." In the epistles of the 
New Testament we find the story of a church 
that found herself, "the unity of the Spirit in 
the bond of peace." As a church draws out 
from their isolated corners its various forces 
to the center of a common related purpose it 
forms for conquest. 

3. "Ene, mene, mine, mo" Who does not 
remember the childish incantation of our 
games? It meant absolutely nothing to us. 
We knew nothing of its origin or purpose. Yet 
its rhythmic recitation gave us an undeniable 
satisfaction. It stands for the traditional 
repetition of ideas we have not possessed, or 
acts whose usefulness we have not investi- 
gated. A father asked his little boy recently 
what he had learned at school that day. He 
answered, "Gesind." On his father's mystifica- 
tion, he explained it. "Two gesind four twice ; 
two gesind six three times; two gesind eight 
four times." That was all — "gesind" — words 



CARRIED OVER LIABILITIES 109 

without meaning, whose significance he had 
never possessed at all. Yet it is not uncom- 
mon, in much the same manner, to let the pub- 
lic preaching of the truth become a substitute 
for its possession by personal appropriation 
in our own lives. Often, too, our service is 
determined by what has been rather than what 
ought to be, decided by a fresh facing of our 
situation in a*i unconventional way. Doug- 
lass Jerrold said, "Some men can never relish 
a full moon, out of respect for that venerable 
institution, the old one." 

"When I became a man I put away childish 
things." 



XXI 

"THE WILL" 

In his powerful and poignant little half- 
hour play entitled The Will, James M. Barrie 
has traced the growth of that strange and 
fatal sickness of the soul called Greed. The 
whole action takes place in a London solici- 
tor's office to which a man comes three times, 
at intervals separated by about twenty years, 
for the purpose of making his will. The cen- 
tral character, Philip Eoss, a young office 
clerk, possessed of a small legacy, is accom- 
panied by his youthful and loving bride. She 
is weeping hysterically at the mere suggestion 
of an instrument so grisly and harrowing as 
a will. Her husband wishes to make the will 
in a single sentence leaving everything of 
which he dies possessed to his wife. She lov- 
ingly protests at being the sole beneficiary, and 
after much wrangling carries the point of 
having two of her husband's cousins provided 
with a hundred pounds a year out of the estate, 
and also of leaving one hundred pounds to a 

110 



"THE WILL" 111 

convalescent home. The lawyer is amused but 
touched as well. "You are a ridiculous 
couple," he tells them, "but don't change, espe- 
cially if you get on in the world." "No fear," 
is the light-hearted answer from both. 

Twenty years later they are in the same 
room again for the same purpose, to make a 
new will disposing of an estate of seventy 
thousand pounds. Philip Eoss is now one of 
the rising merchants of London. His wife, a 
woman of forty, sure of herself, not so much 
dressed, says Barrie, as "richly upholstered," 
has come on her own initiative to see that her 
husband does "nothing foolish." There is a 
hot- worded war over the husband's determina- 
tion to leave his wife a life interest in the 
estate instead of outright possession. Each 
refers to it as "my money." The old tender 
solicitude which the lawyer had found at once 
so ridiculous and charming is gone. "One 
would think you were afraid of my marrying 
again," she reproaches him. "One would think 
you were looking for my dying," he angrily 
retorts. The allowance to the elderly cousins 
in poverty is at her instance reduced from one 
hundred to fifty pounds. She objects to his 
leaving a thousand pounds to a hospital as 



112 FARES, PLEASE! 

unnecessary, but he clings to a bequest of five 
hundred pounds, because he wants to make a 
"splash in hospitals." 

On the last visit Sir Philip Ross, now 
knighted, comes alone. His wife is dead and 
he comes to cancel all previous wills, especially 
for the purpose of cutting off without a penny 
his two children. The son has proved a 
"rotter," to use the father's own term, and the 
daughter has run away and married against 
his wishes. He starts to dictate to the lawyer. 
"I leave it — leave it — my God ! I don't know 
what to do with it." Then in a fit of swelling 
anger he shouts to the lawyer, "Here are the 
names of the half dozen men I've fought with 
most for gold, and I've beaten them. Draw 
up my will leaving all my money to be divided 
among them, with my respectful curses, and 
I'll sign it." 

One of the minor characters in the first 
scene is an old clerk in the office, who has just 
been told by his physician that he has an in- 
curable cancer. He repeats to his employer 
the doctor's comment about it. "There is a 
spot of that kind in pretty near all of us, and 
if we don't look out it does for us in the end. 
He calls it the accursed thing, and I think he 



"THE WILL" 113 

meant we should know of it and be on the 
watch." This reference to a cancer spot 
Barrie uses most effectively at the end of the 
story as a fine and delicate symbolism for 
Greed. 

Barrie did not write this searching parable 
for millionaires. They face, no doubt in 
complicated and excessive form, a peril of 
riches that Jesus ever pointed out. It is a 
sickness of the soul whose risk of infection we 
cannot avoid by the simple means of failing 
to amass wealth; it is one of the common ills 
whose risk all flesh is heir to. 

We are amazed, when we look into it, at the 
number of the words of Jesus which deal with 
the getting and spending of wealth. They 
form so large a part of the body of his teach- 
ing as almost to suggest a lack of a proper 
sense of proportion in the writers of the Gos- 
pels. But nothing else stands as clearer evi- 
dence that he knew what was in man. 

One of the great pictures on the walls of 
the Boston Public Library is Abbey's rich and 
colorful painting of Sir Galahad's fight with 
the Seven Deadly Sins. Murder, lust, intem- 
perance, and the flagrant passions of the flesh 
in their onslaught against the soul, are nobly 



114 FARES, PLEASE! 

delineated. But the picture of the deadly sins 
as Jesus draws it in the Gospels is a very dif- 
ferent one. To him the deadliest sins were 
those of the disposition, the cold hardness of 
greed, unteachable pride, and selfish un- 
brotherliness. These sins are more incurable 
because they are less easily discovered. Any 
man knows when he has been drunk, but who 
is able to place his finger on the moment when 
the miasma of covetousness touches him? The 
sins of the mind and disposition wreck the 
very means by which guilt can be 'determined. 
The light, which should show the darkness, 
becomes darkness itself. 

A writer in Harper's Weekly in commenting 
on Barrie's play said if only a man would 
arise who could make Barrie's preachment 
effective and really rid our lives of greed, he 
would be the great liberator whom all the 
world waits to acclaim. 

Why wait? 

"Philip findeth Nathanael and saith unto 
him, We have found him." The Messiah is 
here, the liberator from greed, who can train 
us to overcome evil with the positive good of 
a life which radiates from a living center of 
love. 



XXII 
"DUTCH COUKAGE" 

All the explosions in the great world war 
have been of shrapnel or torpedoes. Hoary 
ideas have gone up with a bang. The explo- 
sion of many of the time-honored delusions 
must be set down to the credit side of the stag- 
gering tragedy which has made the month of 
August, 1914, forever memorable. The elo- 
quent argument of the sufficiency of commerce 
as an insurance of world peace will never 
again impose on the childlike credulity of 
millions of people. It has been blasted into a 
million fragments. Nor will the world ever 
rest its hope in the progress of "culture" as 
a guarantee of humanity. Like Humpty 
Dumpty it has fallen never to rise again. 

Not least among these happy explosions has 
been the passing of the tradition of alcohol 
as an aid to military efficiency. While most 
of the words of the New Testament seem to 
have been buried clear out of sight, one of 
them has dawned on the governments of 

115 



116 FARES, PLEASE! 

Europe as never before — "If thine hand offend 
thee, cut it off." Both despotism and democ- 
racy have made a ruthless war on intoxication. 
In the field, particularly, the ancient faith of 
many commanders in the value of "Dutch 
courage," which term denotes the artificial 
bravado created by semi-intoxication, has been 
wholly discounted. This is a war of the 
trenches, in which victory depends not on the 
sudden charge of half-crazed men, but on the 
long endurance and sure marksmanship of the 
gunners. One of the last public utterances 
of Lord Eoberts, was that in his judgment 
eight tenths of the value of a soldier depended 
on his efficiency as a shot. This is a field 
where the "courage" induced by alcohol is 
ruinous. The war is being fought by sober 
men. Deeper and more lasting sources of 
courage than that of the distillery have been 
sought and found. 

This newer philosophy of the culture of 
courage is highly significant for all other 
aspects of life. "Dutch courage," or the false 
daring and bravado, created either by stimu- 
lants or by false views of life which act like 
intoxicants, is miserably insufficient for the 
long run where victory turns on endurance. 



"DUTCH COURAGE" 117 

The life that wins is not a Charge of the Light 
Brigade, but an inch-by-inch campaign in 
trenches, and its lasting "nerve" must come 
from the deepest springs. 

Intoxicants and drugs furnish a deceptive 
and abnormal courage for many. They are 
"brave" for the battle in the pathetic manner 
of Tam o'Shanter : 

Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious, 
O'er all the ills of life victorious. 

Poor Tam! It was the kind of courage that 
always oozes out at the finger tips. Men nerve 
themselves for some particular effort with 
what they call a "pick-me-up," only to find it 
a "throw-me-down" at the critical time. We 
have gone far when we have learned that 
nature does not relish any jokes played on the 
nervous system. The terrible revenge of na- 
ture against the "jokes" of artificial stimula- 
tion is that finally the system fails to respond 
at all. 

Rosy and superficial views of life are the 
means by which a "fighting front" is main- 
tained by others. They overcome evil by the 
deliciously simple expedient of the ostrich — 
looking the other way. Christian Science 



118 FARES, PLEASE! 

keeps its devotees keyed up by denying ,the 
existence of evil. New Thought tells us to 
keep our mind so occupied with pink and 
yellow thoughts that the ugly black and blue 
ones can never hurt us. Both of them make 
as satisfactory equipment for the realities of 
life as a picnic lunch would be for a six- 
months' campaign. 

Mere motion is another common resort for 
keeping up the spirits. Only keep life spin- 
ning fast enough with different things and all 
will be well. Thoughtlessness is made the 
measure of its buoyancy. An old and battered 
top will look a bright red so long as it is 
spinning fast ; only when it stops does its real 
dinginess appear. So an artificial thoughtless- 
ness due to mere activity often passes for "the 
red badge of courage." 

Lasting valor for the long campaign comes 
only from within. The secret of it is in that 
word in the Psalms, "I have nourished thee 
from the great depths." 

The consciousness of the presence and power 
of God is necessary for true courage. "Had 
it not been for thee, my soul had dwelt in 
silence." The Cardinal Legate at Augsburg 
said to Luther, "Do you expect your princes 



"DUTCH COURAGE" 119 

to take up arms to defend a wretched worm 
like you ? I tell you, No ! And where will you 
be then?" Luther calmly replied, "Right 
where I am now, in the hands of Almighty 
God." 

The possession of truth is an unfailing 
spring. Make our lives part of the truth and 
purpose which is larger than our personal 
aims, and we destroy the paralyzing hesitation 
of self-consciousness. The heroic valor of the 
trenches of northern France, on both sides, 
came from the feeling in the breasts of the 
men that they were part of a larger and more 
glorious thing than themselves — the nation. 
When we can say truly, "To this end am I 
come, that I might bear witness to the truth," 
we have the spirit which enabled the Master to 
face the power of Rome itself without a quiver. 

Love of men completes courage. It was the 
large source of the fearlessness of Jesus. He 
believed so deeply in men, loved so strongly 
the best that was in them, that he was never 
afraid of their worst. When we really love 
men we are delivered from the fear of acting 
for their best good. 



XXIII 

HIGH-HANDED TYRANNY 

Tyranny has never been popular in 
America. "When a long train of abuses and 
usurpations, pursuing invariably the same 
object, evinces a design to reduce them under 
absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their 
duty, to throw off such government and to 
provide new guards for their future security." 
These are the glowing words of the Declara- 
tion of Independence. The spirit of the men 
who risked their lives in signing that docu- 
ment has been bred into the very bone of later 
generations. We have kept the form and, to 
a very large degree, the substance of that pro- 
test against absolutism. But of late the 
national conscience has been deeply stirred by 
the evidences of what is known as "invisible 
government." Under the forms of the popular 
will there has developed a malign and unseen 
machinery of "influence" which has exerted a 
guiding hand on legislation. We have been 
called to a fresh crusade for some kind of a 

120 



HIGH-HANDED TYRANNY 121 

"new freedom" from the domination of large 
vested interests, to reestablish the reality as 
well as the forms of popular government, a 
crusade which is perhaps the most hopeful 
movement of our time. 

To bring it ultimate success we need an 
assertion of freedom that runs far deeper than 
the freeing of legislation. The worst kind of 
invisible government of a people is that which 
is still more "invisible" than the manipula- 
tions of a large trust. It is the subtle and 
insidious high-handed tyranny of popular 
ideals and commercial standards which throw 
around the moral and spiritual independence 
of the individual a shackling despotism. It 
consists of such intangible elements as ways 
of looking at things and standards of value, 
but which, like the unseen pull of gravitation, 
are powerful in concrete results. 

There is a far extended tyranny of bigness 
which infects the spirit with the deadly sure- 
ness of the typhoid germ. G. W. Stevens, in 
his book of incisive -comment on America, The 
Land of the Dollar, tells of having a creamer 
explained to him. " 'It is not yet finished/ the 
owner was saying, 'but when it is, I antici- 
pate' — I shuddered, for I knew what was com- 



122 FARES, PLEASE! 

ing — 'it will be the best and the largest in the 
world.' When shall I ever escape this 
tyranny of the biggest thing in the world?" 
Such tyranny shows in the practical accept- 
ance of the idea, Avhether the bald theory 
would be agreed to or not, that the quantity 
of an action, a business or result of any kind, 
somehow makes up for its quality. W. J. 
Bryan says there are three kinds of larceny — 
petty larceny, grand larceny, and glorious 
larceny. "Glorious larceny" is thieving on 
such a large scale that its brilliant success 
atones for its moral crookedness. The popular 
acclaim which mere bigness wins trickles down 
into the minds of multitudes who are acting 
on a much smaller scale and gives values a 
pernicious twist. In The Turmoil Booth Tark- 
ington has put the creed of the rampant and 
dingy commercialism of a Western city in this 
form: 

Give me of Thyself, Bigness; 

Power to get more Power; 

Riches to get more Riches; 

Give me of thy sweat to get more sweat. 

Give me of thy Bigness to get more Bigness for 

myself, 
O Bigness, for thine is the Power and the Glory 
And there is no end hut Bigness, for ever and ever. 



HIGH-HANDED TYRANNY 123 

"The new Freedom" most devoutly to be 
desired is that quality in man which declines 
to be overawed by conventional greatness and 
goes ahead and does its individual best, with- 
out making the silent surrender of quality to 
size. 

Hurry is a ruthless tyrannizer. We have 
barely begun to recover from an era of waste- 
ful pioneering when men were in such a hurry 
to secure the land and use it that all thought of 
conserving anything for future use was for- 
gotten. The attitude to posterity was that of 
Sir Boyle Roche, who said in the House of 
Commons : "Why should we care for posterity? 
What has posterity done for us?" The subway 
guard tells us in the morning to "Step lively !" 
and we* listen to the request to "Hurry up !" 
most of the day. The examples we see urge it. 
The things which can be done quickly, the 
quick profit, the immediate reputation, the 
pleasure that can be seized rather than waited 
for — all these assume the largest proportions 
and appear as the finest prizes. It is a sad 
tyranny, for it obscures the truth that the 
finest things in life are never won in a hurry. 
It takes time to achieve a fine friendship, to 
mold a character or to build up the materials 



124 FAKES, PLEASE! 

of a lasting happiness. The best things in a 
forest are not its mushrooms but its oaks, and 
the best in the heart must grow. 

The squeeze of the crowd flattens out indi- 
viduality by its despotic demand for con- 
formity. It instills a mean terror of singu- 
larity. There is a kind of nervous affection 
known to medicine as agoraphobia — the fear 
of open places. The person afflicted with it 
has an ineradicable aversion to standing alone, 
away from people or the shelter of some build- 
ing. What ravages the "fear of open places" 
has wrought in life, where one's convictions 
would lead him to cut across the accepted 
customs of his associates! The right gives 
place to the "popular." Professor John C. 
van Dyke has described the degeneration of a 
colorist in the field of art. He says that the 
painter finds out that "toned-down, washed- 
out, and faded colors are easier to harmonize 
than fresher ones, and where he formerly 
thought to win by affirmation, he makes his 
color negative or neutral and strives that it 
shall not offend." "Toned-down, washed-out, 
and neutral colors" are sadly flapping from 
the rigging of many a life once bravely decked 
out with the positive hues of conviction. 



HIGH-HANDED TYRANNY 125 

You have read the Declaration of Independ- 
ence and are proud of it. Have you ever made 
one of your own? Emerson says, "To every 
young man or woman the world puts the same 
question, 'Wilt thou become one of us?' and 
the soul in each of them answers heartily, 
'No V The world has no interest so deep as to 
cherish that resistance." 



XXIV 

A HAIR-TRIGGER CONSTITUTION 

Probably no one has given a better descrip- 
tion of the temperament we all know only too 
well, and describe as a "hair-trigger constitu- 
tion/' than Lord Macaulay. Writing of Lord 
Glengarry, a Scotchman of the time of Dun- 
dee's Eebellion, he says, "He was one of those 
persons who think it dignified to imagine that 
other people are always insulting them." We 
call them "touchy," "thin-skinned," "sensi- 
tive," sometimes with a skin so tender that it 
responds to any allusion that can be construed 
into a personal reflection, with all the im- 
mediacy of an open blister. "Get the facts 
first," says Mark Twain in "My First Lie," 
"and then you can distort them as you please." 
Most any fact can be distorted by the man with 
a hair-trigger constitution into a grievous 
personal thrust at himself. The root of the 
malady is in a self-consciousness that never 
sleeps. It is doomed, like a ghost, to continu- 
ally walk, alive and alert. The family crest, 

126 



HAIR-TRIGGER CONSTITUTION 127 

appropriately hanging over many an office 
desk might well be the old flag of the Green 
Mountain Boys in the Revolution, with its 
coiled serpent and the legend, "Don't tread on 
me !" The most general observations are mar- 
velously distilled into particular and personal 
remarks. In a very different sense from that 
applied by Shakespeare to the poet, they "give 
to airy nothing a local habitation and a name." 
Sometimes we apply the term "hair-trigger" 
not only to a sensitive vanity, but also to a 
general irritability which is ready to explode 
at a moment's notice. A gentleman in Indiana 
has compounded a substance called Mitchelite, 
which is claimed to be the most powerful 
explosive known. But it may be doubted 
whether its tendency to ignite without overdue 
persuasion may not be matched and over- 
matched by many human parallels. Such a 
nervous tension is not by any means the prod- 
uct of modern times, but it has been vastly 
augmented and specialized by the city's speed 
and din. A good deal of the saltpeter in the 
human constitution comes from the jangle and 
jar of the crowd. "Do you count the sheep 
jumping over a fence?" a man suffering from 
insomnia was asked. "No," he answered. "I 



128 FARES, PLEASE! 

count the automobiles as they whiz by." The 
reply puts the whole change of a generation 
in a nutshell. All the myriad kinds and de- 
grees of "whizzes" tend to the upbuilding of 
the hair-trigger constitution. 

Such a temperament wonderfully adds to 
the minor earthquakes of life. Yet there is a 
cardinal place in the scheme of things for the 
"touchy" person. Touchiness may be made of 
splendid use, not by being obliterated directly, 
but by being focused at a new point. Jesus 
was the "touchiest" person who ever lived. 
There is a sensitiveness and an alertness which 
is a divine grace, as well as that which is a 
human fault, and each continually asks the 
same question, "Who touched me?" Only one 
with a "hair-trigger" personality would ever 
have felt the mute appeal of the suffering 
woman in the crowd who put forth her hand 
to touch the hem of His garment. Jesus was 
instantly alive to the smallest disturbance in 
his environment. Such disturbance did not 
touch his vanity, for he had none. It unerr- 
ingly struck something deeper — his sympathy. 
There was no more miraculous quality about 
him than a sympathy which not only goes out 
to the multitude, but so acutely alert and 



HAIR-TRIGGER CONSTITUTION 129 

quick that it could pick out the one needy 
woman from the crowd as deftly as the magnet 
picks up the piece of steel from other matter. 
We may well add to the common complaint of 
the traditional portrait of Christ, that it 
utterly misses his strength, this other lack, 
that it necessarily fails to convey the alertness, 
the qui vive, which was always with him. 

Such a "touchiness" as was Christ's, his 
"tangibility" we might say, is always one of 
the world's greatest needs. So easily, much 
of our daily walk, so far as ability to imagine 
need and quickness to respond to it are con- 
cerned, becomes a sort of sleep-walking. The 
"hair-trigger" quality of Christ's sympathy 
comes partly from two qualities which can be 
reproduced — alertness and dramatic power. 
Like the vanity of the man who so easily finds 
slights, the sympathy of Jesus was always on 
"field duty," reaching out for the barest possi- 
bility of its exercise. Lack of alertness sub- 
tracts largely from the possible blessing be- 
stowed by even the tenderest heart. It must 
not only have something to give stored away 
but the dispatch of a trigger to move it. 

We fail often, too, through lack of exercise 
of dramatic power. True sympathy calls for 



130 FARES, PLEASE! 

the art of making a swift and veracious pic- 
ture of a person or situation. Whatever dra- 
matic power one may have or develop will be 
more largely and fruitfully utilized in the path 
of Christian discipleship than in any other 
sphere on earth. Sympathy, so far from being 
a weak and mushy sentimentalisin, is the most 
intellectual operation a man may engage in. 
It calls for seeing and understanding all the 
elements in a situation and putting himself 
lovingly in imagination in the midst of them. 
The Christian who responds with heart and 
brain to the varied and complex needs of 
others has composed a library of dramas, as he 
makes their situation live before him. 

The negative virtue of the "hair trigger" 
man is that he is abnormally awake. It may 
be transformed into a rare instrument of 
power by changing its focus. 



XXV 

THE LATEST THIN)G 

When G. Lowes Dickinson made his first 
visit to America he came to the conclusion that 
the dominant national passion was for wealth. 
On his second visit he revised that judgment 
as being superficial and decided that the great 
ambition was not so much for wealth as for 
power. On his last visit, however, he con- 
cluded that the ruling passion was neither for 
wealth nor for power, but for acceleration. 
There are moments when the simple process of 
crossing the street leads us all to agree with 
him. 

There are also moments when our observa- 
tion would lead us to set up alongside of ac- 
celeration as an ideal which holds a wide and 
growing sway, the passion for novelty, the 
desire to be sure that one is doing, seeing, 
wearing, or thinking — the Latest Thing. 

John Galsworthy, in his book of bright and 
sharp, but not bitter, satires, The Little Man, 
has drawn an exquisite portrait of a woman 

131 



132 PARES, PLEASE! 

whose life was a chase of the Latest Thing, 
showing the mental vacuum which was always 
regarded by her as "living her life to the full." 
Nearly every line of his keen description sug- 
gests traits which are easily recognizable as 
old acquaintances. "To look at a thing," he 
says of this Passionate Pilgrim of the New, 
"without possessing it was intolerable, but to 
keep it after she had got it was even more so. 
She had flung open all the doors of life and 
was so continuously going out and coming in, 
that life had considerable difficulty in catching 
a glimpse of her at all." She was "a mere 
perpetual glancing from quick-sliding eyes, to 
see the next move, to catch a new movement, 
God bless it!" She swam "on the full deep 
river of sensations, nibbling each other's 
tails. To say that she had her favorite 
books, plays, men, dogs, colors, was to do her 
but momentary justice. A deeper equity 
assigned her only one favorite, the Next, and 
for the sake of that one favorite, no Catherine, 
no Semiramis, no Messalina, could more 
swiftly depose all the others. Life, she thought, 
must be so dull for the poor creatures doing 
one thing at a time and that for so long." 
In one sentence of his description, Gals- 



THE LATEST THING 133 

worthy touches the real destructiveness of the 
enthronement of novelty as the ruling passion. 
"Life was so full that the moment it stood 
still, and was simply old life, it seemed to be 
no life at all." There is one passage as full 
of spiritual understanding as it is of delicious 
satire: "Once in a new book she came across 
a tale of a man who 'lived' in Persia, of all 
heavenly places, frantically pursuing sensa- 
tion. Entering, one day, the courtyard of his 
house, he heard a sigh behind him, and looking 
around, saw his own spirit, apparently in the 
act of breathing its last. The little thing, dry 
and white, was opening and shutting its mouth 
for all the world like an oyster trying to 
breathe. 'What is it?' he said. 'You don't 
seem well.' And his spirit answered : 'It's all 
right, it's all right. Don't distress yourself. 
It's nothing. I've been crowded out, that's 
all.' And with a wheeze, the little thing went 
flat." "The moon," Galsworthy concludes, 
"was as yet the only thing which had eluded 
her avidity, that — and her own soul." 

We see this quest at the top of the social 
ladder in the American woman in Paris who 
offers a prize of five thousand dollars to any 
pne who will invent a really new social 



134 FARES, PLEASE! 

"stunt." We see it daily in the most ordinary- 
spheres. Owen Wister tells of a lady who 
went into the Public Library in Philadelphia 
and asked the librarian to recommend a book. 
He gave her one, but she looked at the title 
page in disgust. "Why, this is a year old," she 
said. "Give me something new." So he 
handed her one that had just been laid that 
day by Robert W. Chambers. We see it in the 
folks who follow the call of "off with the old 
love, on with the new," and whose friendships, 
in the words of Douglass Jerrold, "are so 
warm, that they no sooner take them up than 
they must lay them down again." Most sadly 
do we see it in the numbers who rarely ever 
follow through any helpful piece of service, 
before they are lured away by some new will- 
o'-the-wisp. 

The cult of the Latest Thing makes super- 
ficial people. The real satisfaction and value 
of our experiences do not come in the door- 
ways and porches, but in the living rooms ; in 
the things we know well enough and have 
worked at long and patiently enough to obtain 
their real reward. That only final source of 
happiness, character, never comes from a 
sight-seeing tour, but from the settled proc- 



THE LATEST THING 135 

esses of work and home. The hunt of the 
Latest Thing yields only shells. Dr. Cabot 
has cleverly parodized some lines from "The 
Village Blacksmith" : 

Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing, 

So I my life conduct. 

Each morning sees some task begun, 

Each evening sees it chucked. 

It makes irresponsible people. The work of 
the world cannot be done by jumping- jacks, 
and its working capital of hope and courage 
and love has an old-fashioned way of being 
little affected by whether a thing is novel or 
not. "The first quality of a soldier/' said 
Thiers, "is constancy in enduring fatigue and 
privation. Valor is only the second." The 
warfare of the Kingdom depends on the same 
first quality. 

There are many roads to monotony, but the 
surest and most direct is the quest of the 
Latest Thing. Keal novelty in life is always 
an inner freshness and never an outward 
change. The person whose faithfulness in 
individual and social service yields him the 
glory of seeing new growth in the personality 
of others, lives always in a new world. No life 



136 FARES, PLEASE! 

on earth ever teemed with such startling 
novelties as did that of Jesus. He saw the 
travail of his soul and was satisfied. "I have 
meat to eat that ye know not of." 



XXVI 

OVER THE WALL 

"By my God have I leaped over a wall." 

In these words David at the zenith of his 
career as king at Jerusalem recalls the athletic 
buoyancy of his boyhood days on the Bethle- 
hem hills. His heart returns in the fullness 
of his years to the free life of the shepherd boy 
with its 

leaping from rock up to rock, 
The strong rending of boughs from the fir tree, the cool 
silver shock 
Of a plunge in the pool's living water. 

As his mind lovingly returns to that life of 
the hills, it occurs to him that the old acro- 
batic leap of his boyhood is a figure large 
enough to express the divine romance of his 
providential career. His has been a strange 
history, successively surmounting walls that 
rose up before him and overshadowed his spirit, 
and he gratefully recognizes that it has been 
by his God that he has leaped over them. If 

137 



138 FARES, PLEASE! 

we will glance at three swiftly moving pictures 
in the life of this king, we will find that the 
words are not only large enough to give us 
the secret of David's life, but may afford a 
true transcript of any spiritual history. 

The first is the dark picture of the man 
hedged in by the walls of a great sin. The man 
after God's own heart is overshadowed by the 
black murder done at the dictates of passion. 
We rarely see the real nature of sin so clearly 
as in David, a man so responsive to spiritual 
impressions, so full of the riches of heart's 
affection, so strong, so much of a genius, so 
steadily ascending in power and character! 
What a dismal anticlimax his sin was ! 

It would only have been in line with innu- 
merable life tragedies if, in his remorse, he 
had thought of himself as fallen like Lucifer, 
never to rise again. That is so often the his- 
tory, an aspiring upward path and then a drop 
into a deep well. And they accept the fall. 
How many spiritual histories could be told 
in the couplet of George Macdonald — 

There came a mist and a blinding rain, 
And life was never the same again. 

But David did not stay in the pit. By his 



OVER THE WALL 139 

God he leaped over the wall. Read that inter- 
view with Nathan and its searching convic- 
tion, "Thou art the man," and then that 
marvelous prayer of penitence, "Against thee, 
thee only, have I sinned." Quick as a flash — 
the word is poor, for no flash ever went off so 
quickly as the movement of God's heart to true 
repentance — God answers, "I have forgiven 
thee." 

The great thing about the sin of David was 
that it was a parenthesis. It was not a full 
stop, and after the break in the story the 
thread of grace is taken up again. David did 
not leap over the wall of sin by merely saying, 
"That was a bad mistake ; I must do better in 
the future." We know how little that avails. 
We cannot lift ourselves out of the pit by our 
own boot-straps. We conquer sin, not by tak- 
ing thought but by taking God, and are lifted 
from the mire by the strong cords of a forgiv- 
ing, redeeming love. 

The second picture is a brighter one. It is 
in the cave where his enemy, Saul, is sleeping 
in David's power. Between them the towering 
walls of antipathy, dislike, and fear have risen 
up as barriers, and the swift thought of the 
sword as an easy way to end it all rushes into 



140 FARES, PLEASE! 

David's mind. But he escapes by bringing 
into their relation the thought of God. This 
man Saul, this man that he does not like and 
with good reason, is still the Lord's anointed, 
still has claims on his consideration. 

What a high and strong leap this overcom- 
ing of the walls of resentment and prejudice 
is, we all know. Racial, social, and personal 
barriers to our sympathy rise up on every 
hand. Samuel Johnson said a very typical 
thing when he declared that "he could like 
everybody except an American." We all have 
our own Bills of Exceptions. It was Scotch- 
men with Charles Lamb, whom he said he had 
been trying to like all his life without any 
success. We say we can work with any one 
except this particular person or that. "He 
gets on our nerves." We do not often over- 
come our imperfect sympathies by a reasoned 
process. We leap over the wall of dislike and 
exclusion only as David did, by getting a God's 
eye view of the other man. It was only when 
the early church learned with Paul to see in 
the contemned Gentile and the barbarian 
without the law the brothers for whom Christ 
died that it was welded into that conquering 
union which knew neither bond nor free, 



OVER THE WALL 141* 

Scythian nor Barbarian. No matter what 
may be the extent of our estate or what man- 
sions we may erect, we shall never succeed in 
building anything but a little prison house 
for our spirits unless we get the divine view 
of human relationships. 

The last picture is a sublime one. The little 
child of David has died. But he refuses to 
accept as final the dark walls of death. He 
makest the magnificent leap of faith in immor- 
tality. "He shall not come to me, but I shall 
go to him." It is not the perfect faith as we 
know it in the New Testament. David did not 
have the ladder of Christ by which to make 
the surer climb. But it is probably the fairest 
foregleam of immortality to be found in the 
Old Testament. 

In the shadow of that same wall of death 
we have all sat before; there we shall all sit 
again. And no matter how far we have ad- 
vanced in spiritual knowledge over the days 
of Israel's kings, it is still a leap of faith by 
which we get into the sunlight of hope and 
comfort. It even seems a longer leap to some 
to-day because of the many newly disclosed 
ties, showing our physical relationship to the 
other creatures. In the Museum of Natural 



142 FARES, PLEASE! 

History in New York city there is a striking 
series of the skeletons of the primates, 
arranged in the order of their ascent. At the 
head of the list there is a skeleton of a man, 
bearing a certain number, by its inclusion in 
that collection seeming to tell us : "Here you 
are. A little better than the other apes, a 
little more intelligent, more long-lived and 
adaptable. That is all." 

All? No! Faith says, "I accept the hori- 
zontal lines that show my physical affinities 
to the other creatures of earth; but I see and 
hold to the vertical line that runs upward, 
binding me as a child to an infinite Father, in 
whose heart I have an eternal worth." Faith 
says with Paul, "O death, where is thy sting?" 
It says with Ruskin, "Why should we wear 
black for the guests of God?" 



XXVII 

CLOUDING THE ISSUE 

In all the catalogue of political tricks there 
is no form of cleverness which brings larger 
returns than skill in "clouding the issue." 
This art carries an argument by discussing 
something distantly related to it and succeeds 
in making the whole thing turn on a point 
which has little or nothing to do with it. 
Millions of unsophisticated citizens have voted 
to have the city treasury looted by a gang of 
thieves because the scheme was cleverly draped 
with the national flag while the band played 
"The Star-Spangled Banner." We may smile 
at the Carolina mountaineer who came up to 
the polling booth a few years ago to cast his 
ballot for Jefferson Davis ; but it is not quite 
so amusing to think that there are large num- 
bers of people who vote the Kepublican or 
Democratic ticket at strictly local elections 
because of their admiration of Lincoln or their 
reverence for the memory of the late Thomas 
Jefferson. This is the high art of the liquor 

143 



144 FARES, PLEASE! 

propagandist who seeks to cloud the question 
of the moral and economic curse of the saloon 
with the specious issue of "personal liberty." 

Looked at in view of all of its consequences, 
this guileless "innocence" of allowing the 
judgment to be confused by things irrelevant, 
is a deadly form of sin. The cleverness which 
causes it is part of that strategy which makes 
up the largest part of the destructive power of 
all sin, its ingenuity of disguise. It is an 
ingenuity which dates from Eden, and every- 
thing new to be said about it was old centuries 
ago. It is a question, however, whether the 
old pitfall of the disguises and fictions of sin 
does not merit a freshened attention because 
of a sure growth of softening the asperities of 
life in the language used in the social and 
business world. 

Whatever may be the reason, whether from 
an advance in politeness or a more adroit 
salesmanship, old-fashioned plain and harsh 
words are giving place to more subdued 
and inviting ones. What used to be called 
"cast-off" clothing is advertised and sold as 
"slightly used" — a much more mild and agree- 
able term. Instead of the old term "boarders" 
we see frequent advertisements which refer 



CLOUDING THE ISSUE 145 

to "table guests." Who ever hears of a second- 
hand typewriter now? It is always a "rebuilt 
machine." The clerk in the department store 
is instructed never to ask if the buyer wishes 
something "cheaper." She deftly suggests 
"something less expensive" — a much more 
flattering way of saying the same thing. 
When a man is sick we learn that he is "indis- 
posed." The old-fashioned cabinet photograph 
which etched our features with pitiless truth 
has given place to the "art study" which 
endows us all with the distinction of beauty. 

That all this makes for pleasantness no one 
can deny. But with the glossing over of hard 
and plain names of things in the minor depart- 
ments of life, there is the very real danger of 
transferring the same pleasant process to its 
major departments and ending up with toning 
down the asperities of sin. There is danger 
of a kind of moral "aphasia," which malady 
consists in being unable to remember the right 
names of things. And "that way lies mad- 
ness." It is hard enough at the best. The 
same thing which is "stubbornness" in another 
is usually labeled "firmness" when it appears 
in ourselves. The "stinginess" of some one 
else is only "prudence" when we act the same 



146 FARES, PLEASE! 

way. And the same words which on the other 
fellow's tongue show "cowardice/' on our own 
are an instance of a "wise caution." 

The strategy of sin has won its battle when 
it gets us to call it by another name. One of 
the most perfect pictures of the strategy of sin 
is the story in the book of Joshua, of the device 
of the Gibeonites who wished to form, for their 
own advantage, an alliance with Israel. Israel 
had been forbidden to make alliances of any 
kind, and the ambassadors of the Gibeonites 
put forward three pleas to show why this 
alliance with them could do no harm. These 
three pleas voice in absolutely perfect form 
the three main strokes of sin in clouding the 
issue. They said : 

1. "We are come from a far country" This 
was the ingratiating start. "There can be no 
evil consequences, for we live so far away." 
So speaks the voice of every temptation from 
that of Eve down to the one we met an hour 
ago. The danger seems remote, chimerical. 
Others might possibly be harmed but not us. 

2. "We are come on account of Jehovah, 
your God." Here is diplomacy of the highest 
order. Temptation never suggests that we 
part with our religion. It whispers that there 



CLOUDING THE ISSUE 147 

is no real antagonism between our religion 
and the course suggested. Unthinkable! It 
will even help Jehovah! There is hardly any 
sin whose real character cannot be clouded 
with a religious motive. When a fresh ship- 
load of slaves from Africa was unloaded at 
Newport in colonial days the minister publicly 
rendered fervent thanks to God for his provi- 
dence in "bringing these benighted blacks 
under the blessed influence of the gospel." He 
probably deceived every one — including him- 
self — except the Almighty. 

3. "We are your servants." Here was the 
oily culmination. Temptation comes as oppor- 
tunity. It is the chance of a lifetime for 
knowledge, power, advancement, all of which, 
of course, will be put to a fine use ! 

The Israelites learned that all this golden 
eloquence boiled down finally into one "short 
and ugly word." They were lies. Sin is 
always near in its results; it is atheistic; it 
never serves but always rules. 

"The approach to Constantinople reveals the 
most beautiful city in the world. The glamour 
and romance of the East become for the mo- 
ment realities. But presently the onlooker 
begins to lose the ensemble. The forms of the 



148 FARES, PLEASE! 

buildings become grotesque; the streets grow 
squalid and the people and dogs make up a 
mean and hideous entanglement of life." A 
fair picture of the refractions of sin. The 
only sure method of correcting them is the 
daring of Joshua's dealing with the unknown 
angel, to demand, clear down to the end of 
every serpentine coil of reasoning, "Art thou 
for us or for our enemies?" 



XXVIII 
THE FALLACY OF PREPARATION 

In one of the earlier chapters of her auto- 
biography, Twenty Years at Hull House, Miss 
Jane Addams describes the mood of dissatis- 
faction which came over her at the end of the 
year of European study, following her college 
course. It was the indefinite feeling of being 
tired of spending such a long time in prepar- 
ing for a work which was not as yet clearly 
defined or indicated. She says that she felt 
as though she had made the discovery of a 
practical fallacy which was not mentioned in 
the time-honored list in the books of logic — 
the fallacy of preparation. By that expression 
she denotes the danger of missing many of the 
opportunities of life while engaged on the 
praiseworthy business of preparing for them, 
and especially missing that finest part of 
preparation that comes only through active 
service. 

It is a noteworthy phrase — the fallacy of 

149 



150 FABES, PLEASE! 

preparation. In these days of scientific effi- 
ciency and specialization in business and pro- 
fessions and social and religious work as well, 
there is not much danger of the importance 
of training being lost sight of. But there is 
always danger of our making the lack of train- 
ing or waiting for an ideal completeness of 
preparation an excuse for failing to seize the 
immediate opportunities of service which are 
at hand, and which are very likely to prove 
the best our lives will ever afford. 

No career that comes to mind affords quite 
so complete an instance of the working of this 
fallacy as does that of General George B. Mc- 
Clellan. The Army of the Potomac needed 
first of all a drill-master and McClellan filled 
that requirement to a supreme degree. Yet, 
while appreciating that need, he swung to the 
other extreme of waiting for that readiness 
which in his mind would justify an engage- 
ment, and the judgment of military history is 
that some of the most strategic opportunities 
of the war rushed by while he waited. General 
Meade said of him, "He was always waiting to 
get everything just as he wanted before he 
would attack, and before he could get things 
arranged just as he wanted them the enemy 



FALLACY OF PREPARATION 151 

pounced on him and thwarted all his plans. 
There is now no doubt that he allowed three 
distinct occasions to take Richmond to slip 
through his hand for want of nerve to run 
Avhat he considered risks." He could never rid 
himself of the delusion that the enemy's force 
was far greater than his own, and the actual 
figures always proved him wrong. His con- 
stant complaint in the Peninsular campaign 
was his lack of men, when the records later 
showed that against his one hundred thousand 
men Lee had an army of only sixty-three thou- 
sand. 

Life can be wasted in drilling just as sadly 
as in open profligacy. "We refuse sympathy 
and intimacy with people," writes Emerson, 
"as if we waited for some better sympathy and 
intimacy to come. But whence and where? 
To-morrow Avill be like to-day. Life wastes 
itself while we are preparing to live." The 
real truth of the matter, so easily lost sight of, 
is that preparation and achievement can never 
be wholly separated. Each is a part of the 
other. 

In the service of the Kingdom, holding one- 
self aloof from its tasks while waiting for some 
vague, ideal readiness has wrought incalcu- 



152 FARES, PLEASE! 

lable loss. We do well to wish to be workmen 
needing not to be ashamed. It is well to refuse 
to offer to the Master only the tattered rem- 
nants of our time and attention. The old 
question of David should never be forgotten: 
"Shall I offer to the Lord that which cost me 
nothing?" But it is just as important to 
ponder the deep meaning of Jesus's injunction 
to the hanger back: "Let the dead bury the 
dead, but go thou and preach the kingdom of 
God." We wait for time before we are ready 
to do this or that, forgetting that time for any 
unselfish service is never an accident, but 
always a creation. We wait for some other 
place, under the superstition that we shall find 
that ideal condition which shall justify our 
efforts; whereas the one truth which several 
moves bring home to the mind is not so much 
that all places are alike, for that is not true, 
but that to a large extent we carry our own 
place with us, and that our own attitude and 
disposition are the most determining parts of 
our environment. We wait for the right mood, 
some sparkling hour of inspiration which shall 
sweep us on, forgetting that the high moods 
of victory and daring come only on the invi- 
tation of toil. 



FALLACY OF PREPARATION 153 

"Some day — but not to-day, 
I mean to put these trifles all away, 
And arm myself for manhood's nobler fray, 
To throttle wrong and baffle greed, 
And pour my life out to my brother's need, 
Some day — but«not to-day. 

"It is so hard, just now! 
Another time I shall have learned just how, 
Deliberation will my speech endow 
With that one warm, persuasive word." 
Ah! Hesitator, have you never heard, 
There is no time but now? 



XXIX 

THE CKEATIVE INFLUENCES OF THE 

CHURCH 

There is a world of difference between the 
manifestations of any movement and its crea- 
tive influences. This would seem to be so 
obvious a truth as to make its frequent restate- 
ment superfluous were it not for the universal 
fact that the one is easily mistaken for the 
other. The person who is accurately described 
as a classicist or traditionalist is one who 
makes this mistaken identification and be- 
comes so attentive to the local manifestations 
of a movement that he removes himself from 
the influences which have created it. 

That was the mistake of the Pharisees, 
whose case Jesus summed up in the sentence, 
"You make void the law through your tradi- 
tion." There are no ironies of history more 
striking than those of the followers of great 
movements who, through a mistaken loyalty 
to some of its temporary forms, make it stand 
for the very things against which it was 
originally launched in protest. We see it in 

154 



CREATIVE INFLUENCES 155 

the case of great political parties, which began 
as associations of high-spirited innovators, 
becoming the bulwark of the selfish and reac- 
tionary interests of the political world. In 
another sphere we see it in some who would 
gladly transform, and through a sense of 
loyalty too, so radical a movement as Meth- 
odism, which began as an uncompromising 
protest in the interest of spiritual freedom, a 
daring venturing forth into new fields, into a 
lifeless code of ironclad rules and unvarying 
customs. 

A few years ago there was a gigantic explo- 
sion of dynamite on the New Jersey side of 
New York bay. It shattered thousands of 
windows in Manhattan and even broke dishes 
in Brooklyn, fifteen miles away. All the fire 
engines in the lower part of New York came 
out and raced helplessly up and down the 
streets looking for the cause of the damage. 
They found plenty of manifestations of the 
explosion, but did not discover the cause, for 
that was miles out of their reach. 

The creative influences of the church as 
opposed to the resultant forms of that influ- 
ence are equally far to seek. Gibbon, in the 
classic chapter in which he attempts to explain 



156 FARES, PLEASE! 

the reasons for the success of Christianity, its 
organization, zeal, charity, etc., only puts his 
hand on results which themselves require to 
be accounted for. He never enters the realm 
of final causes at all. 

In a real sense the final creative influences 
of the church will never be comprehended by 
the human mind. "Behold, I show you a mys- 
tery." They lie buried in the unsearchable 
riches of Christ, the central mystery of the 
universe, that God is love. We never find the 
final source of any great river such as the 
Amazon or the Mississippi till we look for 
it in the clouds. But at the head of every 
river there are certain earthly beginnings in 
the form of small eternal springs, from which 
the little stream trickles out to find its glori- 
ous destiny. So, as one explores about that 
great seed plot of modern history, the book of 
Acts, he discovers definite forces which were 
the creators of the church and under whose 
living influence the disciple must ever keep 
himself. 

A life through Christ is the real genius of 
the church, for which no knowledge, no 
tongues, no gifts, no achievements can ever be 
substituted. The Christian Church was first 



CREATIVE INFLUENCES 157 

of all a fellowship of experience. "That which 
we have heard, which we have seen with our 
eyes, which we have looked upon, declare we 
unto you, that ye also may have fellowship 
with us, and truly our fellowship is with the 
Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ." Here 
is the force that created — "It is no longer I 
that live, but Christ liveth in me." All the 
manifestations of the church, if not animated 
by that life-giving force, no matter what 
sacredness usage may throw around them, are 
sterile. There is a pathetic little letter writ- 
ten by Helen Keller to Phillips Brooks, when 
she was about twelve vears old. "Tell me," 
she says, "something that you know about 
God." "Something you know about God" — 
the little blind girl spoke for the whole round 
world. As the same request was voiced from 
the mission field : "We do not want your adjec- 
tival Christianity; give us the substantive 
thing." All else that the church can give, 
lacking its personal experience, is sounding 
brass and tinkling cymbal. Generalization is 
risky, but it does not mean much risk to say 
that the periods in which the church has 
moved with conquering tread have been 
those in which this truth of the active presence 



158 FARES, PLEASE! 

of God in the soul have been emphasized; and 
the epochs when it has languished have been 
those in which this truth has been obscured. 

A brotherhood in Christ. The book of Acts 
is flooded with the golden glow of the dawning 
of a real democracy and brotherhood in Christ. 
Out of the scattered and repellent fragments, 
one living body of Christ was created. It is 
easy to accept the brotherhood of man as a 
dead or blunt truth, but it never becomes a 
creative force until we make earnest with its 
reality. It always means sacrifice. Its keen 
edge which the world feels is well shown in 
a letter which the Duchess of Buckingham 
wrote to Lady Huntingdon, regarding White- 
field and Wesley: "Their doctrines are most 
repulsive and strongly tinctured with imperti- 
nence and disrespect to their superiors. It is 
monstrous to be told that you have a heart as 
sinful as the common wretches that crawl the 
earth. This is highly insulting and I wonder 
that your Ladyship should relish any senti- 
ments so much at variance with high rank and 
good breeding." In the Evangelical Revival 
of the eighteenth century England was re- 
created by the Christian democracy of the first 
century. 



CREATIVE INFLUENCES 159 

An urgency for Christ "When he had seen 
the vision, immediately he endeavored to go." 
Through whatever changing forms it mani- 
fests itself, that urgency of Paul is always the 
soul of a real church. Samuel Johnson paid 
a high, though unintended compliment to John 
Wesley: "His conversation is good, but he is 
never at leisure. He always has to go at a 
certain hour. This is very disagreeable to a 
man who loves to fold his legs and have his 
talk out as I do." John Wesley's legs were 
"unfolded" most of his ninety years. He had 
felt his Master's passion for souls and, like 
him, had not where to lay his head. When 
Captain Gracie, one of the survivors of the 
Titanic, died a year after the disaster, his 
last words were, "We must get them all into 
the lifeboats." That awful hour of the im- 
manence of danger had stamped itself on 
his mind, never to be forgotten. The same 
degree of the vivid sense of the destructiveness 
of sin and the urgency of the good news of 
salvation lay at the heart of the first heralds 
of the cross. 



XXX 

WHICH KINGDOM? 

There are some stories, familiar to the 
world for years, which yet retain the dew of 
their youth. One of these is the classic con- 
cerning the visit of the father of the present 
German emperor to a little country school- 
house. Conducting an impromptu examina- 
tion, he asked a little girl to what kingdom a 
potato belonged and received the right answer 
— to the vegetable kingdom. In the same way 
he was told that a rock belonged to the min- 
eral kingdom. Then, pointing to himself and 
asking the same question, he was delighted 
with the unexpected response that he belonged 
to the kingdom of God. 

.The answer was more correct than the 
"correct" one would have been. We do not 
grudge the repetition of the old story, for it 
is one of those flashes of spiritual understand- 
ing sometimes ordained from the mouths of 
babes. But it deserves far more than the ready 
and unthinking assent which we usually give 

160 



WHICH KINGDOM? 161 

to it. It is always a pertinent question. After 
all, what kingdom do we belong to? The an- 
swer is not so obvious as it might seem. 

When we look at the question in a fresh 
way, that goes down to the very bottom of 
the heart, we realize that we all know people 
who seem to have more real affinities to the 
vegetable kingdom than to any other. They 
live ; they grow ; they take from their environ- 
ment things necessary for their sustenance; 
all the things which a fine garden vegetable 
does — and not a very great deal more. A few 
years ago one of the great capitalists of 
America died, a man known to the public 
mainly by three facts: he was worth more 
than fifty million dollars, he had never taken 
a vacation, and he lunched every day on an 
apple. One of the New York dailies, com- 
menting on his career, said that he had prob- 
ably gotten as much enjoyment out of life as 
a healthy vegetable. Which comment, while 
flavored with witty exaggeration, was headed 
in the direction of truth. Queen Elizabeth 
once asked the secretary of the House of Com- 
mons what passed during the session. He 
answered, wearily, "Seven weeks." To spend 
life merely in passing the time, however pleas- 



162 FARES, PLEASE! 

antly, is truly called "vegetating." Such life 
has no returns from ventures of thought or 
investments of action. It goes "from thought- 
less youth to ruminating age." Somewhere 
along in its latter half it always meets that 
very real tragedy which occurs when life takes 
on a dwindling aspect. Sydney Smith put 
it grimly when he said of a friend, "He spent 
all his life letting down empty buckets into 
empty wells, and now he is frittering away 
his age trying to draw them up again." 

The brightest silver lining to the clouds of 
sorrow is the truth that God uses pain and 
misfortune to awaken us to a higher kingdom. 
Sorrow is usually his call, "Friend, come up 
higher." "I learn day by day," wrote Steven- 
son, on a sick bed, "the value and high doc- 
trinality of suffering. Let me suffer always; 
not more than I can bear, for that drives men 
mad ; but still to suffer some, and never to sink 
to the eyes in comfort and respectability." 
How many life histories are summed up in 
these words of Harriet Martineau: "But for 
the loss of our father's money, we might have 
lived on in the ordinary provincial method of 
ladies with small means, growing narrower 
every year; whereas, by being thrown on our 



WHICH KINGDOM? 163 

resources while it was yet time, we have 
worked hard and usefully, won friends and 
independence, seen the world abundantly 
abroad and at home, in short, have truly lived 
instead of vegetating." 

Sometimes again men become so hard by the 
scramble of competition, so capable of resist- 
ing impression made by anything less soft and 
metallic than a coin, that they seem almost to 
belong to the mineral kingdom. They have the 
undeniable power of making their way that a 
bullet has and the same unyielding quality. 
It is a good thing on occasion to stand like a 
rock ; it is a sad thing to become one. 

We all belong to the animal kingdom, and 
it is not only a worthy ambition but a God- 
given duty to become the best animal of which 
we are capable. But it is a poor stopping 
point. On leaving a famous health resort in 
Germany a grateful patient wrote in the guest 
book, 

Content return I from this blessed wood. 

I found here health, life's highest, truest, good. 

But a wiser man wrote beneath the lines : 

That is not life's best good. That is but half. 
Else were most blest a healthy little calf. 



164 FARES, PLEASE! 

Once when Tennyson was looking at a portrait 
of a retired politician in his bland family 
aspect he made the observation, "He looks like 
a retired panther." There are some politicians 
to whom such assignment to the animal king- 
dom would have had more truth than simile. 

In the kingdom of God every man, emperor 
and peasant, millionaire and clerk, belongs. 
"God is a Spirit, and those who worship him 
must worship in spirit and in truth," has its 
corollary in the truth that man is a spirit, and 
only in the fellowship of his Father's life and 
purpose does he find his true sphere. 

For what are men better than sheep or goats 
That nourish a blind life within the brain, 
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer 
Both for themselves and those who call them friend? 
For so the whole round earth is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. 

The world of nature knows two kinds of forces 
— the gravitant forces, such as gravitation, 
and the radiant forces, such as electricity and 
radium. The man who belongs to the kingdom 
of God holds the gravitant forces of his life, 
its acquisitive and accumulative powers, under 
the domination of the radiant forces of love 
and service. 



XXXI 

"A MAXIM SILENCER FOR OLD 
WHEEZES" 

"A Maxim Silencer for Old Wheezes" is 
the sparkling title of a recent article in the 
Atlantic Monthly. In it Mr. Seymour Deming 
gives ns a list of soft and silencing answers 
with which to drown the endless and tiresome 
repetition of old worn out saws, particularly 
those that have to do with the economic and 
social questions. It would be a fine thing if 
we could have a similarly effective means pre- 
sented for killing off the crystallized lies 
which masquerade as gems of thought in the 
moral and religious world. We are told in 
the New Testament to "try the prophets" be- 
fore following them ; and in this modern world 
it is just as well to "try" the epigrams as well. 
For the power for evil which is carried by a 
crisp looking popular epigram is unreckon- 
able. By dint of endless repetition they get 
themselves believed among those who never 
challenge them, and by implying far more 

165 



166 FARES, PLEASE! 

than they assert they act as paralysis on 
action. 

Hardly a day passes on which we are not 
informed that "it takes all kinds of people to 
make a world." The trite saying is usually let 
drop with an air of having made a fresh contri- 
bution to the world's wisdom. This choice 
remark was given a high place in Gelett Bur- 
gess's celebrated list of "bromides" and with 
reason. Hardly any other piece of conversa- 
tional small change is circulated with more 
frequency by the mentally indolent. It con- 
tains this much truth — that there are all kinds 
of people in the world, and, more than that, 
it takes different kinds of people to make an 
interesting world. But the "epigram" raises 
a mental fog which obscures moral distinc- 
tions. It apologizes for delinquencies as 
though honest men and thieves were as inevita- 
ble classes of men as short men and tall. This 
fog of shallow thinking is shown in the great 
popularity of this flabby quatrain, so often 
used as a wall motto : 

There's so much bad in the best of us, 
And so much good in the worst of us, 
That it doesn't become any of us 
To talk about the rest of us, 



"A MAXIM SILENCER" 167 

With the evil of gossiping we can all hasten 
to heartily agree. But the logical effect of the 
whole is to question seriously the value of 
moral effort and ends in the creeping paralysis 
of "What's the use?" The truth is, of course, 
that it takes only one kind of people to make 
the right kind of a world — the people whose 
lives under all varieties of temperament and 
circumstances are forces in establishing the 
kingdom of God. 

If this lie has slain its thousands, its first 
cousin, "It's not what you believe but what 
you do that counts" has slain its ten thou- 
sands. For through the medium of the post- 
card, the anaemic poetry of the daily press, 
and the thoughtless turning of human phono- 
graphs, this sentiment of the uselessness of 
belief has grown quite imposing and substan- 
tial. It has this coating of truth, of course, 
that an effectual belief always fulfills itself in 
deeds. But in the sense in which it is most 
widely quoted it contains as much wisdom as 
to say, "It doesn't make any difference what 
a farmer plants, it's what he grows that 
counts." This philosophy speaks daily to 
thousands in the following sweet and sickly 
lines : 



168 FAKES, PLEASE! 

So many paths, so many creeds, 
So many words that wind and wind; 

When all the poor old world needs 
Is just the art of being kind. 

How simple ! The verse would lead us to sup- 
pose that the art of being kind were the most 
trifling matter in the world. There could not 
be a greater fallacy. The art of being persist- 
ently and intelligently kind is the most tre- 
mendous task to which the race ever set itself. 
We would stamp as an idiot the man who 
would muse, "So many clouds, so many rains, 
so many useless things in earth and sky, when 
all the world needs is more corn and wheat." 
To grow a stalk of wheat calls for the cosmic 
energies of the universe. And a life of effec- 
tive kindness, in the same way, demands an 
endurance of will and loftiness of motive 
which will not grow in the top soil of senti- 
mentalism but require a real and rational faith 
in God. 

Another old saw which carries the terrify- 
ing club of an axiom is that valiant retainer 
of the liquor traffic and every interest that 
preys on men, "You can't change human 
nature" Many folks, who would scorn to 
allow themselves to be browbeaten by a human 



"A MAXIM SILENCER" 169 

bully with a club, will meekly surrender when 
this blustering bit of nonsense appears. It is 
nonsense because it begs the whole question 
by assuming that human nature is a rigid, 
static thing in which the ignorance, the vices, 
and follies of men were ineradicably set. 
Human nature is a dynamic, living, growing 
thing, and "it doth not yet appear what we 
shall be." We cannot change an acorn, but 
we can mercilessly destroy conditions which 
forbid its development into the mighty, normal 
oak. Which is just what every effort for the 
betterment of humanity aims to do. 

Saint Paul gave the advice in the first cen- 
tury, to "shun old wives' fables." If he were 
here to-day, he would surely let it stand. 



XXXII 

PILGRIM'S PEOGRESS— EEVISED 

Among the curiosities of literature is Ben- 
jamin Franklin's revision of the Lord's 
Prayer. The same ignominious fate which was 
met by Franklin's attempt at improvement 
awaits anyone who would have the imperti- 
nence to lay a revising hand on Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress. The book's timeless place is secured, if 
on no other score, by the approval of a timeless 
childhood. It has been a spring, never dry or 
intermitent, both of good diction and good 
deeds. 

Accordingly, we have not the rashness of 
offering any revision of our own time. We 
venture only to suggest a revision which pre- 
ceded the original work by some centuries, as 
a sort of preliminary footnote. 

The one defect of Bunyan's immortal record 
for our day is its lack of social outlook. The 
story of one lone man battling his way from 
the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, 
however heroic it may be, is always a frag- 

170 



PILGRIM'S PROGRESS 171 

ment. If his solitary victory is all that is 
achieved, we may well ask, from the point of 
view of future pilgrims, 

"But what good came of it at last?" 

Quoth little Peterkin. 
"Why, that I cannot tell," said he; 
"But 'twas a famous victory." 

After Pilgrim comes his wife, in the less 
known sequel, along the same way, to find not 
a stone rolled aside, bridge built, or forest 
cleared. It is a better Pilgrim's Progress 
which is suggested in the book of Proverbs, 
"The path of the righteous is made a high- 
way." The ideal of a man who not only gets 
there himself, but who, as he goes, builds a 
road, levels a hill, is infinitely larger. Such 
an ideal brings to the detached romance of the 
adventurer the social service of the pioneer. 
The figure comes from the thought that the 
desert road on which the caravan moves with 
safety and ease was once the lonely hazard of 
one man over the uncharted waste. 

Every broad highway on which we move 
was once a foot path. Out in Penn Valley 
Park, in Kansas City, beside the track of the 
Santa Fe Railroad, is a monument which 
marks the course of the old Santa Fe trail — 



172 PARES, PLEASE! 

a mute but eloquent commentary on this truth. 
It is a tonic to the spirit to think of the great 
steel highway, along which international traffic 
plunges at the rate of fifty miles an hour, being 
once the daring and solitary wheel print of a 
"prairie schooner." It is true of the highway 
of the spirit as well. It is hard for us to im- 
agine the time when liberty of conscience and 
speech was a new and daring heresy. 

If every road was once a path, the converse 
is equally true, that every path becomes a 
road, and therein lies the inspiration for to- 
day's pilgrim. Glance swiftly at some of the 
stations passed by Bunyan's wayfarer, and 
notice how their bleak outlines blossom as the 
rose to the real life pilgrim who builds as he 
goes. 

Hill Difficulty is on every path. The mag- 
netism which there is in the mere hope of 
getting to the top is often too weak to urge 
on a heart that is heavier than lead. But add 
the prospect of laying a pavement, of driving 
a stake for the next man to pull up by, and it 
is a new road. It is just as hard, perhaps, but 
a lot more worth while. Christ began with 
the hill path. That new and living way by 
which we easily go to the heart of God was 



PILGRIM'S PROGRESS 173 

first laid out by forty days of hard journeying 
in the wilderness of temptation. He made a 
Pilgrim's Progress for the hope which was set 
before him. He was strong to save because he 
was strong to suffer. It is always true. By 
the development of our own strength to serve, 
by our addition to the world's stock of hill- 
reducing examples, we lay paving stones on 
every hill we ascend. 

Doubting Castle is less of a grim dungeon 
viewed in this light. Phillips Brooks says 
that very few men have helped others by a 
direct solving of their doubts, but that an 
innumerable company have made a way out of 
doubt for others by showing them the spectacle 
of one holding true his course of life when it 
was known that all doubts were not at rest. 
Tennyson was overwhelmed on his eightieth 
birthday by the expressions of love that came 
in from all parts of the world. "I do not know 
what I have done," he said, "that so many 
people should feel grateful to me except that 
I have always kept my faith in immortality." 
What an "all" it was! The stanzas of "In 
Memoriam" loom up like the girders of a 
great bridge from doubt to faith which has 
furnished sure footing for thousands. 



174 FARES, PLEASE! 

Even the Slough of Despond grows its 
flowers. The noblest tribute ever paid to Pitt, 
finer than any that Macaulay or Lecky ever 
penned, was the remark of an infantry cap- 
tain. "No one," he said, "ever went into his 
closet without coming out a braver man." The 
spectacle of Pitt making his way through 
Herculean tasks helped the soldier to face his 
own. Out of his own hard path Pitt made a 
common highway for the spirit of the nation. 

Pioneer days in our national development 
exist only in books and memory. But in the 
religious and moral life road-building days 
never pass away. Wherever men and women 
are bravely meeting their own difficulties and 
conquering them we can hear the crash of the 
ax of the pioneer. 



XXXIII 
WASHING THE AIR 

In nearly every large city hospital there will 
be found a device for the startling but useful 
purpose of "washing the air." It is a jarlike 
receptacle which may be attached to any win- 
dow, and through which the air is forced 
through water for purification, and set in mo- 
tion by a fan. It catches the outdoor breezes, 
gives them a thorough shampoo, and dispenses 
them for needy nostrils. Even when the hos- 
pital is environed with a forest of smoke 
stacks, the air can be "washed" for safe and 
healing use. 

The modest little jar at the hospital window 
is a graphic picture of the function of prayer 
in a life set against a grim and dusty back- 
ground. There is no theater of an active, busy 
life whose atmosphere does not hold in solu- 
tion dust and dirt that lodges in the mind and 
heart, obscuring vision and lowering vitality. 
Aims, standards, and practices not our own 
will lodge in the mind as surely as dust in the 

175 



176 FARES, PLEASE! 

lungs, unless the air we move in is continually 
charged with new life. The mediaeval solution 
of this problem was to go where the air was 
free from contagious dust, necessarily arising 
from an evil world. The Christian solution is 
not to flee from the air, but to wash it ; to pass 
it through what has been finely called the great 
alembic of God's will in prayer and to renew 
it through the transformation of the mind as 
a heart is lifted up into a new world and 
new air. 

It is also true that the largest part of our 
service for others is the indirect one of clear- 
ing the atmosphere, "washing the air" in 
which they live, furnishing a medium in which 
their best may spontaneously spring up. The 
direct and immediate benefits we are able to 
give are largely confined to cases of excep- 
tional intimacy, or a rare endowment of wis- 
dom or means. We cannot assume direct 
charge or responsibility of another and expect 
to do much service by infallible advice or 
repeated exhortation. Such an attitude re- 
sembles too closely the one who would say, "I 
am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips let no 
dog bark!" We do most when our attitude 
and temperament induce a response, as pure 



WASHING THE AIR 177 

air, without alluding to its presence or pur- 
pose, builds up tissue. 

Attach your spiritual device for washing the 
air to the window of a room which is full of 
strife, and what a new current circles through ! 
"A soft answer turneth away wrath." It 
brings to the atnlosphere an oxidation which 
is death to the germ of strife. Lincoln had in 
his large and generous personality such a 
faculty, without which his best work would 
have remained undone. "Do you know," asks 
an irate partisan, bursting in on him, "that the 
Secretary of War called you a blamed fool?" 
"Well," comes the unruffled answer, "Stanton 
is generally right." Such a spirit is like open- 
ing a door in a close room and allowing a cool 
breeze to sweep through. It enables a stifled 
self-control and judgment to breathe anew. 

For how truly great a genius is another role, 
that of comforter in sorrow, cast ! Rarely does 
the word sent out in direct treatment ever 
come within sight of its mark. Our most sin- 
cere word often "thrusts a bungling hand amid 
the heartstrings of a friend." The offering of 
the truest philosophy and citation of Scripture 
leave the air still close. The error we often 
make is to assume that we can by any effort 



178 FARES, PLEASE! 

heal the wound directly. God and his great 
almoner Time alone can do that. But to be 
present with a quiet and steady affection 
which takes itself for granted is to pass the 
heavy atmosphere weighing down on our 
friend through the medium of a sympathetic 
friendship, and so give it new life. 

But the most frequent contribution which 
we can make to the air which others breathe is 
that which fills it with the oxygen of incentive. 
How quickly one transported from the East 
Side of New York responds to the pines of the 
Adirondacks. The great danger which the 
newcomer to Colorado runs is that he will 
work himself beyond his strength in a few 
weeks. There is an exhilaration in the air 
which makes for work — a freshness and a zest, 
from which all germs of "the sleeping sick- 
ness" have been effectually sponged out. It 
has the same effect which a high and resolute 
attitude to life carries with it wherever it 
appears. "Beauty and rhythm," says Plato, 
in a noble apology for art, "find their way into 
the secret places of the soul." So does every 
kind of noble activity tend to create its repro- 
duction, not as a mechanical replica but as a 
native growth. 



WASHING THE AIR 179 

In the first story published by the late O. 
Henry there is a young shop girl who keeps 
a picture of Lord Kitchener on her table, not 
having the least idea who he was, because he 
had a "stern face." It was stern enough, at 
any rate, to tide her over, by implied disap- 
proval, the temptation of the one night with 
which the author's sobering story concerns 
itself. It is not overdrawn. The fine and 
noble face of Frederick W. Robertson has 
hung over the desk of more than one man, 
through the months and years, washing the air 
clean of low aims and mean desires. 

One thing about this device merits atten- 
tion. It is a power plant. It calls for fuel, 
energy, sacrifice. Purifying air concerns itself 
with such concrete things as coal, steam, 
dynamos. It is never passive. 'This indirect 
method of service is not, therefore, easy. It 
must be, not the sporadic effort of an hour 
but the massed impression of a life. That 
which sustains life comes from a life which 
is itself a sustained effort. 



XXXIV 

"AT YOUR PEKIL!" 

"We get our bread at the peril of our lives," 
ran the testimony of the author of the book of 
Lamentations, vividly picturing the uncertain- 
ties of life in the conquered and desolate Jeru- 
salem. We may well render thanks that the 
lines are fallen to us in pleasant places where 
we can win a livelihood without the risk of 
life itself. Render thanks, that is, if in doing 
so we do not forget that we have still a long 
way to go in reducing the physical peril of 
life. Nor need we go to Europe for examples. 
There are too many thousand preventable acci- 
dents in our own land that still make timely 
the bitter cry of Thomas Hood, fifty years ago : 

O God, that bread should be so dear 
And flesh and blood so cheap! 

A brilliant inventor has given this testimony : 
"If I can produce a device to save time, I can 
dispose of it in twenty places; but if I offer 
an idea for saving life, I can hardly dispose 

180 



"AT YOUR PERIL!" 181 

of it at all." Time is money, but a man is 
easily replaced. 

Yet no matter how safe industry and travel 
may become in the future years, the old word 
of Lamentations will always be true of the 
spiritual life. We will always get our bread 
at the risk of having the process deaden our 
spiritual aspiration and hunger. On the gates 
at the entrance to every occupation and pro- 
fession, there is written "At Your Peril !" To 
say that is not to chant a wail over work. 
Without labor the finest faculties of the soul 
would sicken and droop. Yet, with all the 
benefits which follow the concentrated pursuit 
of an occupation, it holds perils as real as did 
the forests where our ancestors hunted game 
for food. 

In the mere fact of routine, so large a part 
of our daily toil, there lies the constant menace 
to the mind and heart of life becoming an 
uninspiring drag. Constantly thinking and 
working in any groove holds the danger of 
blunting the sensibilities to all that lies out- 
side of that groove. "Tell me about Spain, 
romantic Spain," asked a friend of an auto- 
mobile tourist. "Well," he replied, "down in 
the valleys the roads are pretty good, but up 



182 FARES, PLEASE! 

in the hill they are awful." Spain meant 
nothing but roads to him. With his eyes glued 
to the ruts, he missed entirely the face of the 
fields and the face of man. "Born a man, died 
a grocer," is often a true epitaph. Nor does 
the mere kind of routine make very much 
difference. Even so glorious a thing as preach- 
ing may be allowed to become an unspiritual 
drag. The tendency is to strike a level and 
strike it so low as to leave out all high aspira- 
tions and endeavors. 

There is the lifelong peril of the means be- 
coming the end. Like the dyer's hand the 
mind becomes subdued to what it works in, 
and the final purpose of life is forgotten in the 
process of sustaining and furnishing it. The 
number of things lost in a large city in the 
course of a year is amazing. The London 
police office handles over one hundred thou- 
sand lost articles every year. But what a 
much more appalling tale would be the story 
of those finer lost things which are never re- 
ported and often not even detected — ideals 
slipped away, purposes pared down, and aims 
beclouded ! When the means becomes the end 
the world becomes a landscape without a sky. 

Let him who thinks he has escaped in his 



"At YOUR PERIL!" 183 

money-getting the peril of covetousness and 
avarice thank God ; then let him hasten to take 
heed lest he fall. There is much food for 
thought in the statement of a priest that he 
had every conceivable fault confessed to him 
except one — that of penury and stinginess. A 
great artist has given on canvas his concep- 
tion of avarice as having the forepart of the 
body like a dragon and the rear part like a 
shapeless iceberg. It is his portrayal of the 
truth that the approach of avarice freezes 
every fine enthusiasm and generous movement 
of the heart. Other vices spoil different as- 
pects of life ; this one chills it at the center. 

Against these perils which do not appear 
on Saint Paul's notable list — perils of the 
counter, perils of the office, perils of the street 
— there is only one remedy, a very hard and 
heroic one: "Watch and pray." Thread your 
routine with the nobler quest of the Kingdom, 
supplement the contacts of the market place 
with the companionship of the King, and you 
will go unscathed by the Pestilence that 
walketh at noonday. 



XXXV 

EVERYTHING UPSIDE DOWN 

In the aisle of a large department store the 
week before Christmas, a lady who looked like 
an animated Christmas tree, with packages 
dangling from each arm, and a gentleman who 
was looking the other way, were demonstrat- 
ing to the complete satisfaction of the on- 
lookers the incontestable theorem that two 
bodies cannot occupy the same space at the 
same time. There was a disastrous collision 
and the packages flew in four directions. As 
the man stooped to pick up the packages, the 
woman gave relief to her feelings : "O, I hate 
Christmas, anyhow! It turns everything up- 
side down!" It was on the tip of the man's 
tongue to say, "Why, that is just what it is 
made for," but there was a weather signal in 
the look in her eye which told him that the 
hour was not propitious for such philosophiz- 
ing, so he lifted his hat and passed on. But he 
always felt grateful to her for the deep though 
unconscious wisdom of her remark. 

184 



UPSIDE DOWN 185 

There is far-reaching appropriateness in the 
fact that the world's immortal baby story, 
that of Bethlehem, should be a story of turn- 
ing things upside down — for that is a baby's 
chief business. It is a gross slander on babies 
that their chief passion is food. It is re- 
arrangement. Every orthodox baby rearranges 
all that he sees, from the order of importance 
in the family to the bric-a-brac and window 
curtains. The advent of every baby completely 
upsets his little world, both physically and 
spiritually. And it is not one of the smallest 
values of the fact that the Saviour of the 
world came into it as a baby, that it reminds 
men that every baby is born a savior, to some 
extent, from selfishness and greed and sin in 
the little circle which his advent blesses. 

Christmas turns everything upside down. 
This is the central truth of the incarnation — 
"Immanuel, God with us." The upside of 
heaven come down to earth. "The Word was 
made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we be- 
held his glory, . . . full of grace and truth." 
Men miss the entire meaning of Jesus when 
they see in him the highest upreach of man; 
he is God reaching down and making common 
cause with man's struggle. The meaning of 



186 FARES, PLEASE! 

Christmas puts down the mighty things in 
men's minds from their seats — place, riches, 
talents — and exalts the things of low degree — 
humility, simplicity, and trust. Charles Lamb, 
in one of his most delightful essays, sets high 
worth on the observance of All Fools' Day, 
because it says to a man: "You look wise. 
Pray correct that error!" Christmas brings 
the universal message to men: "You look im- 
portant and great; pray correct that error." 
It overturns the false standards that have 
blinded the vision and sets up again in their 
rightful magnitude those childlike qualities 
by which we enter the Kingdom. 

Christmas turns things inside out. Under 
the spell of the Christmas story the locked up 
treasures of kindliness and sympathy come 
from the inside of the heart, where they are 
often kept imprisoned, to the outside of actual 
expression in deed and word. We read of the 
visit of the Wise Men, that when they saw the 
Child they unlocked the chest and took out 
their gifts. It is the vision of the Christ-child 
which enables all men to get at the best treas- 
ures of their lives and offer them for use. 

Christmas turns things last end foremost. 
The people whom the world arranges last in 



UPSIDE DOWN 187 

its procession — the weary, the poor, the 
foolish, the lame, the halt, the blind — these are 
the ones who come at the very head of the 
column in the consideration of the Little Child 
who leads. The last, the least, the lost — how 
often those words were on Jesus's lips — the 
three great objects of his passion! It is not 
the world's idea of correct form. Here is the 
order of seating on an old New England 
Church, as preserved in its records: "First, 
dignity of descent; second, place of public 
trust; third, pious disposition; fourth, estate; 
last (and least no doubt!) peculiar service- 
ableness of any kind." What a commentary 
on the New Testament! And yet most of us 
unconsciously arrange our acquaintances or 
possible acquaintances in the order of what 
advantage they may be to us. Jesus reverses 
the whole scheme as a perversion and sets up 
a new basis of classification. His question is 
not, What can this man do for me? but What 
can I do for him? The most important person 
for us to know, he tells us both by word and 
example, is the one who needs us most. "The 
first shall be last and the last shall be first." 



XXXVI 

GETTING ALL RUN DOWN 

In the spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's 

breast; 
In the spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another 

crest. 

In the spring also the barns along the 
country roadside begin to burgeon with large 
and gaudily painted enticements to buy Jones' 
Sarsaparilla or Smith's Elixir of Life for 
"that run-down feeling." They are worded 
so alluringly that if we had not noticed the 
symptoms before, we are almost persuaded 
when we finish that we are pretty much "run 
down." 

"Getting all run down" seems to be quite 
popular, particularly among those classes 
which can afford it. Nervous exhaustion in 
all its various forms has appeared so often 
that it has been deemed worthy of a name all 
of its own — "Americanitis." It is usually a 
partial product of that ubiquitous and iniqui- 
tous trinity, hurry, worry, and jar. And for a 

188 



GETTING ALL RUN DOWN 189 

long time it had elevated the Spring Tonic 
into the dignity and proportion of a national 
movement. But as a nation we are fortunately 
getting over the drug habit. The advertise- 
ment is no longer our chief guide, philosopher, 
and friend in matters of health. We have 
listened to wiser advice and are learning that 
to cure a disease calls for far different 
remedies than merely to stifle its symptoms. 
Not many ills are cured from bottles, and in 
nervous exhaustion particularly, the final reli- 
ance is on rest, food, and change. 

Getting all run down is serious business and 
frequently wins too little sympathy from those 
who are entire strangers to overtaxed nerves. 
In a large number of cases, however, and per- 
haps to some extent in most, the physical ex- 
haustion is only the easily noticed foreground, 
of which the equally important background 
which must be taken into account is spiritual 
depletion. Where there is little or no reserve 
of spiritual life and strength one is much more 
liable to get run down in spirits and conse- 
quently in physical stamina. The exertion 
which a healthy man does not notice drains 
heavily when the reserve fund is low. Many 
a wise physician meets cases where the funda- 



190 FARES, PLEASE! 

mental need is not a few teaspoonfuls of any 
prescription so much as it is a new grip on 
life and a new outlook that will come only 
through prayer and a new sense of God. Many 
a physician not so wise keeps doctoring in the 
dark for ills that have one real root at least in 
spiritual bankruptcy. The process of getting 
toned up often depends on the ability to re- 
cover a conquering and confident mood, and a 
lost mood is one of the hardest things on earth 
to find. When Carlyle had lost, through the 
carelessness of Mill's servant, his only manu- 
script of the French Revolution, his wife tried 
to comfort him by telling him he could write 
it again. "I can get the facts again,' ' he said, 
"but how shall I recover the glorious mood in 
which it was struck off at white heat?" 

This recovery of a glorious mood is only 
possible by bringing ourselves freshly under 
the conditions which first caused it. And for 
all cases of lost spirits the most important 
element of restoration is the quickening at the 
center of the sense and presence of God. "He 
restoreth my soul." A contractor was asked 
why a certain group of houses collapsed. He 
replied that the workmen took the scaffolding 
down before they put the wallpaper up. The 



GETTING ALL RUN DOWN 191 

construction of some lives is equally thin. To 
have a vigorous and real spiritual life at the 
center is our greatest need for every point on 
the circumference. 

Another frequent cause of getting run down 
in spirits is the fact that when our time is all 
frittered away in unimportant pursuits it 
easily begins to drag. Some one asked an 
attendant at a large German sanitarium what 
the guests did in rainy weather. "O," he an- 
swered, "they just annoy themselves." It 
describes very well the result of many fussy 
activities even when the skies are clear. They 
"annoy" themselves, and the annoyance, sus- 
tained by no high motives and bringing no 
bracing returns, wears on the nerves. It was 
a vastly different answer which the keeper of 
the lighthouse on Long Island gave to the 
question as to whether he got lonesome. "Not 
since I saved my man," he said with a gleam 
in his eye. The joy which is real re-creation 
is the joy of service, to which Miss Sullivan, 
the teacher of Helen Keller, has given such 
fine expression in one of her letters : "My heart 
is singing for joy this morning. The light of 
understanding has shown on my little pupil's 
mind and, behold, all things are new !" 



192 FARES, PLEASE! 

Every one who lives earnestly must expect 
fatigue. We must use whatever means we can 
to restore the wearing down — rest, fresh air, 
and change. There is room even for the right 
"spring tonic." But behind all these things 
is something finer and surer. "Even the 
youths shall faint and be weary, and the young 
men shall utterly fail; but they that wait 
upon the Lord shall renew their strength; 
they shall mount up with wings as eagles ; they 
shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, 
and not faint." 



XXXVII 

"SPLENDID FAILURES" 

Mr. Harry Graham has gone to a strange 
and unfrequented field for material for a very 
suggestive book which he calls Splendid 
Failures. Under this title he groups a number 
of 'men of great endowment and wonderful 
promise who never achieved any results at 
all commensurate with their talents or public 
expectation. They plucked victory by the 
sleeve, but were not able to hold her, and their 
moments of success have been quite forgotten 
because of their ultimate failure. While the 
author does not add the role of moralist to 
that of biographer, some of his studies are so 
extremely instructive that he who runs may 
read their teaching in the simple and un- 
adorned recital. The stories of three men in 
particular are thought-provoking to a degree, 
and are well worthy of a place in our remem- 
brance. 

"The Cockney Raphael" This is the title 
given to Benjamin Robert Hay don, a name un- 
known to modern ears, but who, on his advent 

193 



194 FARES, PLEASE! 

in London in the early part of the nineteenth 
century, was greeted as one of the greatest 
painters of centuries. His first painting was 
warmly welcomed by the Academy and sold 
for one hundred guineas. In # rapid succession 
he produced large historical paintings which 
were acclaimed by Hazlitt, no incompetent 
critic, as the finest works of art since the days 
of Titian. Wordsworth said of his "Christ 
Entering Jerusalem" that it was worth wait- 
ing half a century to complete. When it was 
exhibited the whole of Piccadilly was blocked 
by the carriages of those who wished to see it. 
Leigh Hunt said of one of his works that "it 
was a bit of embodied lightning." W^alter 
Scott paid him a flattering tribute: "When 
all the figures in the picture get up and walk 
away I want the little girl in the foreground." 
Haydon was the possessor of abundant and 
undoubted talent and to it he added the virtues 
of unslackening industry; several times he 
nearly blinded himself with overwork. 

Even in the world of art to-day the name of 
Haydon means nothing. The crossed threads 
of many misfortunes run through his career, 
but his inclusion in a list of "splendid 
failures" is due most of all to two causes of 



"SPLENDID FAILURES" 195 

many a failure, splendid and otherwise — pride 
and envy. The early and enthusiastic recog- 
nition turned Haydon's pride, already great 
enough, into assurance of colossal propor- 
tions. "What Homer dared, I'll dare," he 
cries. "Genius was sent into the world, not 
to obey laws, but to give them." "Give me 
the dome of Saint Paul's," he exclaimed when 
told that his canvases were too large. To this 
blinding pride was coupled the destructive 
force of envy. In long series of bitter letters 
he heaped satire and abuse on rivals and 
critics, and lived to see the early popularity 
turn into neglect and caricature and found 
himself friendless and bankrupt. The fair 
promise of early years was turned into a tragic 
struggle with debt and disappointment, to 
which suicide finally put an end. 

"A Shooting Star/ 7 This was the charac- 
terization given by Lord Rosebery to Charles 
Townshend, who held at different times in the 
latter half of the eighteenth century nearly 
every post in the British Cabinet. He was 
Pitt's only rival in the admiration of the 
House of Commons and was confidently ex- 
pected to leave as immortal a name in history 
as Pitt's. Great indeed must have been the 



196 FARES, PLEASE! 

talents which could have won from Macaulay 
the tribute, "the most versatile of mankind." 
Hume admitted him "the cleverest fellow in 
England." Burke said, "Never in this or in 
any other century did there arise a man of 
more pointed and polished wit, or, where his 
passions were not concerned, of more refined, 
exquisite, or penetrating judgment." 

Why should it be necessary to explain at 
length just who so marvelous a prodigy was? 
Surely, here is equipment enough for one of the 
"few, the immortal names that are not born to 
die"! With Townshend it was nothing more 
complex than an entire lack of fixed principle 
which might bring to some lasting fruition 
his prodigal endowment. His only principle 
was the career open to talents. He would have 
agreed with the maxim of Talleyrand that un- 
selfish devotion to a principle or a party im- 
periled a man's chances of success. Let the 
immortality of Pitt and the nameless abscurity 
of Townshend speak as to the truth of Talley- 
rand's cynicism! Townshend was never ear- 
nest, loyal to no one, and though he was hailed 
as the "greatest man of his age," lacking com- 
mon truth and common sincerity, he is remem- 
bered only by a few historians as a man whose 



"SPLENDID FAILURES" 197 

disastrous policy helped to rend the British 
empire, and an orator of whose power nothing 
remains but the faint reflection of a rhetorical 
blaze. 

"Little Hartley" Hartley Coleridge, in- 
herited much of the strange genius of his 
father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was 
dubbed "the Philosopher" by Lamb when he 
was three years old. At nine he had written 
several tragedies, and at twelve was an accom- 
plished Greek scholar. At twenty he was 
appointed a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. 
Surely, here was a fine sunrise! Yet before 
he could enter on his Fellowship those habits 
of dissipation which made him so soon a splen- 
did failure had set in, and all the rest of his 
life was "bound in shallows and in miseries," 
of a lack of self-control and mental concentra- 
tion. He left some poetry, highly popular in 
its day, among which are some of the finest 
lyrics in the language — a faint gleam of what 
might have been. He died at the age of forty- 
seven, having been indulgently cared for by 
Wordsworth for many years. His biography 
might be well summed up in a single line of 
his own : "And still I am a child, tho' I grow 
old." 



198 FARES, PLEASE! 

Splendid Failures are not good company as 
a steady thing. They are depressing. And yet 
they do for us one thing which is well worth 
having done at any price. They take away 
from some very familiar words all sense of 
the hackneyed and give them a startling and 
fresh application: "Not by might nor by 
power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord." 



XXXVIII 
SWAN SONGS 

In that finest assertion of immortality to 
be found outside of the Scriptures, the death- 
less Phgedo of Plato, Socrates speaks of the 
tradition of the swan singing before it dies. 
"For they, having sung all their lifelong, do 
then sing more than ever that they are about 
to go away to the God whose ministers they 
are. Men slanderously affirm that they sing a 
lament at the last. And I too, believing myself 
to be the consecrated servant of the same God 
and fellow-servant of the swans, would not go 
out of life less merrily than they." 

So the great pre-Christian saint refuses to 
make his final song a lament but voices a 
psean of affirmation. Following such a noble 
tradition some of the great seers of the race 
have left among their last utterances, their 
swan songs, part of the world's most priceless 
treasure. The records of these hours of 
supreme insight well repay our study. 

One of the most imperishable pictures in all 
literature is that given us in Augustine's Con- 
fessions, where he and his mother, Monica, 

199 



200 FARES, PLEASE! 

just before her death, stand hand in hand, 
gazing out over the blue of the Mediterranean 
Avondering just what the character of the 
eternal life will be, upon which she is so soon 
to enter. We cherish the picture because it 
expresses so perfectly a universal hope, love, 
and wonder. "With what body do they 
come?" The old question of Paul's day ever 
remains in human hearts. 

Three of the most inspired singers of our 
own times have left for us in their later songs 
three different aspects of immortality which 
appealed most strongly to them as the end 
approached. In those three aspects of faith 
we find three characteristics of eternal life 
which make up the sum of all we need to know. 

1. "To meet my Pilot face to face." This is 
the legacy to the world left by Alfred Tenny- 
son, a rational faith in a personal God, to 
whom the human soul has an eternal value. He 
has fought his doubts and those of his age for 
more than half a century. He has done valiant 
service for the faith. He is now at peace. 

For tho' from out the bourne of Time and Space 

The flood may bear me far, 
I hope to meet my Pilot face to face 

When I have crossed the Bar. 



SWAN SONGS 201 

He explained the Pilot to his son Hallain as 
"that Divine and Unseen who is always guid- 
ing us." The Pilot to Tennyson was no vague 
"stream of tendency which makes for right- 
eousness" ; no "Infinite and eternal energy 
from which all things proceed." "Mind," he 
enjoined his son a few days before his death, 
"you put 'Crossing the Bar' at the end of all 
editions of my poems." It was his communica- 
tion to the world that eternal life meant facing 
the living Pilot. 

2. "0 thou soul of my soul." These are the 
words of one who never turned his back but 
marched breast forward, Robert Browning. 
They were written in his last years when the 
death of his wife was still, as it always re- 
mained, an unhealed hurt. His militant faith 
in immortality includes a personal God as 
surely as that of Tennyson, but his fresh sor- 
row leads him to think of death mainly as the 
reunion of a deathless human love : 

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave. 

The black moment's at end, 
And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, 

Shall dwindle, shall blend, 
Shall change, shall become, first a peace out of pain, 

Then a light, then thy breast, 
O thou soul of my soul, I shall clasp thee again, 

And with God be at rest. 



202 FARES, PLEASE! 

Had Robert Browning never written a word 
of poetry, he would have left the world im- 
measurably in his debt by imparting what was 
almost a new sacredness to marriage. His 
fine and pure chivalry lifted human love into 
divinity. His faith in the eternal reunion of 
souls knit together on earth, as expressed in 
"Prospice," is a permanent part of the world's 
hope. 

3. "So the right word be said." This is the 
voice of our own Whittier in one of his last 
songs, voicing an aspect of immortality some- 
times forgotten. He does not forget the earth 
he is to leave, but takes his "freehold of 
thanksgiving" in the faith that the strivings 
of his life here will contribute to the onward 
march of his brothers after he is gone. 

Others shall sing the song, 
Others shall right the wrong, 
Finish what I begin 
And all I fail of win. 

What matters, I or they 
Mine or another's day, 
So the right word be said 
And life the sweeter made? 

Immortality of influence on earth will not of 
itself satisfy our eternal longing, but it is a 



SWAN SONGS 203 

vital part of the deepest hope of every true 
soul. Being dead, to yet speak, and be a bless- 
ing to to-morrow as well as to to-day is a 
part of the power of an endless life. 

How much better these assured aspects of 
immortality than the idle speculations with 
which the curious concern themselves, with 
their pre- and post-millenniums, their fan- 
tastic dates, their exact chartings of the 
streets of the New Jerusalem ! For the glori- 
ous faith expressed in these supreme hours 
is among the things revealed which belong to 
us and to our children forever. The assur- 
ance of God, the permanence of personality, 
the onward sweep of the Kingdom on earth — 
these things do not minister to a restless curi- 
osity ; they are the sure girding of great souls 
in the thickest of the fight. 



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